Re: ***Official HD-DVD Player Thread***
Got my A1 last week.
I just don't know how to describe what I have found over the last few days.
Stunning only begins to explain. I had expected the HD picture to be good, sure, but I had no idea just how much better "good" could be!
There is something almost completely different about the picture. I have seen some really good prerecorded stuff from my DVHS library, and this exceeds them.
Not only is the picture very sharp and crisp, with a lot of contrast, and good blacks - but the COLOR is something I had NEVER known could improve like this.
It's not oversaturated, that would not be the right word, it's just BIG - HUGE range, yet in looking at the skin tones, they are perfect, smooth, detailed, almost like a large-format photographic slide.
My DVHS was never able to present such a huge impression of color and contrast range. I think maybe this just has to be something to do with the VC1 used by the movies on these discs, compared to the Mpeg 2 on the DVHS.
"Stunning" also applies to the VALUE. The SD DVD upscaling on this player is phenomenal! I had seen a couple reports from users that the upscaling was very good, but I had taken it with a pinch of salt, as I really didn't see how they could do it at this price.
Well I've put the salt back in the cupboard. Subjectively, this is the best picture I've ever seen from SD DVDs. Beats my Denon 5900 and 2910 outright. Objectively, I've thrown my library of test discs at at and it only failed ONE TEST.
The test it failed was on the HQV test disc, where a 24 film source is mixed with a 30 fps video titling overlay, and the titling became jagged. This is irrelevant for DVDs anyway, as you'll only see this situation on broadcast, not film based DVD movies.
Everything else passed - caramba!
Stunning also applies to the audio - the DD+ is very, very nice. I got a Denon 2807 last week to use with this player, so that I can use the HDMI, which is the best way. I would have chosen analog as a second choice.
I am seeing 96/24 coming in to the AVR, which is confusing me a bit, since I thought that the audio on the discs were mostly 48/16. I have a friend with a Chord DAC64, which upconverts CDs to hi res audio. He came over when I raised this with him and poked at the A1. His view is that the A1 is upsampling the audio to 96/24, and that it sounds like it also! He was quite impressed with the sound.
Can anyone verify this?
All in all, I am just flabbergasted by this machine. For $500 I was hoping to get great Hi Def movies, not much more. I have gotten amazing hi def movies and a lot more.
I cannot think of a single home theatre purchase I have ever made that comes anywhere near being as good a buy as this one.
Sorry to make such a long post as my first
but I just had to say it.
As far as what some of the folks have said on this forum, I'm having a hard time agreeing.
I got 6 movies with the player and I have played all of them in the last few days. Nothing has gone wrong at all. No freezes, no hangups, nada. No HDMI issues either, which is odd, because according to some,this happens everytime it is turned on. All I can say is that I can MAKE the HDMI error come on if I want to, all you do is turn the A1 on without being plugged into a TV, or if the TV is off.
As far the slow operation, it does take a while to power up - I timed it at 25 seconds, and a few more to start playing. I think most of the delay is while it figures out exactly what kind of disc is in the tray.
Once you get past the startup, operation is very snappy. VERY snappy. This shocked me, because it is a real contrast to the slow startup. Every press I made on the remote, ie. Pause, fast forward, chapter skip, has an instantaneous response.
Play and eject are slower. But the eject on my 5900 takes forever also, same with the 2910.
If you choose the advanced menus while the movies are playing, they appear so quickly that I didn't even realize they weren't there before - seriously, just "poof" and they were up. I think the reason they intruded so little are that they appear in the black space at the bottom of the movie.
I'm still learning the player and messing with more stuff. So these are my impressions after just a week on my SRXD Sony RPTV.
HIGHLY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED - I just can't say enough about how pleasantly surprised I am with this purchase.
EDIT - I am running the unit in 1080i mode. As far as I can tell this is the best, no question. When 720p is selected, it appears that the unit actually downscales to 540p, then back up to 720p. At least this is what it looks like from the material I've tried.
