HELP! chosing dvd player for Hitachi s500 (1 Viewer)

[Mike Capulli]

Recently bought a Hitachi 65s500. Im very pleased with the set aside from my current problem... chosing which route to go with a DVD player.

Now the Hitachi can take pretty much any source (480i, 480p, 540p, 720p, 1080i) and scales it up to either 540p or 1080i via its "virtual HD" processing. If you input a 1080i source however; you do not have a conversion choice.

Here is my dilema. I either have to have the DVD player upconvert it, or let the TV do the upconversion to HD. Im not sure which would be better: getting a great 480i/p player and having the TV upscale to HD... or getting a DVD player with DVI and letting that play straight to the TV at 1080i.

I have already gone that route and purchased a Samsung HD931 player, however I am not very excited about the player. A lot of the image gets cropped off (for example the entire right blue border of the THX Certification intro) and Im having bad problems with audio syncing. However, this player does have the Faroudja DCDi chip as well as the great DVI connection, providing a very clean image.

Regardless I cannot use a DVD player with off sync audio and a horribly offcenter image. Do you guys think id be better off going the other route with a good 480p player with a nice zoom feature? If so, would a player with the Faroudja chip just be useless because of the way my TV upscales the signal to 1080i or 540p? I dont want to spend over 400 for a DVD player.

Any help would be greatly appreciated... Im kind of confused and aggrivated over the whole thing here.

 

[nate n]

The panasonic rp82, xp30, xp50, and rp72(5disc changer) are all very highly regarded. Denons are also very favorable at this forum. I have the xp30 with a 57s700.

 

[joey mr]

i also have the xp30 and isn,t it a nice player man but for question i would let the dvd player do the deinterlacing then the set


because you can pick up progressive scan players cheap these days but it is up to you to test them out and see wich way you want to go

 

[Mike Capulli]

yea I figured. The samsung with the DVI has a great picture... but then again, how can I compare if I havent tried a great 480i player. Hopefully I can still get as good of a picture.

 

[John S]

I'm doing 480i with a cheap player, allowing the TV to do the Progressive scan, with pretty jaw dropping performance.
Just though component video though.


I would think with DVI, it would be way best to let the TV do it all.

 

[Mike Capulli]

well the thing with DVI is, it bypasses the Digital to analog converters in the DVD and TV player. with my old player, I noticed alot of like edge enhancement looking charactaristics. Even at the bottom line of the letterbox for 2.35 movies, you could see a thin dark line above it on the picture that would normally look like edge enhancement. this player with DVI has nothing like that. But then again, who's to say its because of DVI vs. Component and not just a crappy old player?