Yamakawa 288KVGA DVD PLAYER (1 Viewer)

[Sheldon-m]

I HAVE SEEN SOME THREADS ON THIS PLAYER. BUT MY QUESTION IS WHAT COULD YOU COMPARE THIS PLAYER TO? I'M THINKING OF GETTING ONE SO DO YOU THINK IT IS BETTER THAN MY PIO 563A DVD PLAYER.IF ANYONE HAS ONE PLEASE HELP BEFORE I TAKE THE 50 DOLLAR PLUNGE. THX ALL

 

[JackS]

Sheldon- This may be a very good player and someone upto date on these things can probably give you a answer. It's the name "Yamakawa" that has my attention. I've seen other brands that play off of name brands i.e Pananasonic, Sonie International, Mitsibisu etc. My inclination is to avoid these. You might want to wait until there is plenty of info on this player before buying. Your Pioneer is probably on a shelve above this player would be my uneducated guess.

 

[Jay Blair]

Sheldon, I've had the Yamakawa for a while now and though I obviously haven't tried every low cost DVD player out there, I do think you would be hard pressed to find a better player for $50. There is a thread over at the AVS forum in the DVD players section on the Yamakawa players with more of my comments on this player and comments from many others.

The 480i/576i output of the player is firstrate, very sharp and detailed without looking processed. Color is excellant. As I've written elsewhere, the downfall of this player and every other sub-$100 player I'm familiar with is its progressive output. The unit appears to be a flag-reader only, so you are likely to run into the normal artifacting you get from poorly flagged discs, of which there are many. But on a well done DVD, the image is actually a little sharper than my $500 highly regarded Panasonic RP91 and looks absolutely wonderful. The player has a bit higher video noise level than my RP91, but it still puts out a cleaner image than anything I've seen at anywhere near this price point, cleaner in fact and sharper than my Momitsu V880 at 480i/p. The player lets you adjust sharpness, hue, saturation, contrast, luma delay, brightness, and gamma, and has lots and lots of settings to adjust the sound. What other player for $50 can do all that?

And it is easily made region free with a simple menu hack (the hack was shipped with my player) and converts PAL to NTSC and does it extremely well, again better than my much more expensive Momitsu.

If progressive scan quality is a big concern, you can do better, but for interlaced output, this player looks much more expensive than it is, the build quality is good, and it's about twice as heavy as any other player I've seen at this price point.

I mainly got this unit because none of my other much more expensive players shows time remaining on a title, which at times I really like to have for the extras on a disc. I was very surprised at just how good it is.

For $50 or $60 it's hard to go wrong with this player. And it comes with a full 1 year parts and labor warranty. Most cheap players are only 1 year on parts these days.

 

[Sheldon-m]

thats what i have been reading. That it is a good dvd player. i might take the dip for 50$. i got an e mail yesterday from Anthony from Yama. I had emailed him about the 365divx and he said there should be an American version out in two months. i really hope they don't cheap the major chips in this one for the american version. i have read that the euro version works very good. any knowledge on it jay b. THX

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Wow, I always figured that if Yamaha and Kawasaki ever double-teamed on something it would be a motorcycle.

 

[Jay Blair]

Sheldon,

I don't know anything about the Yama 365. I think there is some discussion of it over at the AVS Forum along with a 375 model, but I haven't paid much attention other than that I think it does upscaling. I'll definitely be interested in hearing more about this player when it's available in the U.S.

If Yama would just take the feature set of the 288 and add 720p and 1080i upscaling over VGA, DVI and component at say around $130-$160, they would have a product that might dominate the low end DVD home theater marketplace, especially if they would add DCDI de-interlacing. And based on the $50-$60 price point of the 288, I don't see why they couldn't do all this for 3 times the money.

 

[GraysonAng]

Sheldon,

Did you order it? How do you like it?

 

[Jim Mcc]

I just ordered the 288 today. I read a lot about it at Avsforum.com and everyone loves it. It apparently looks better in interlaced mode. I want to try it with my X1 projector, which along with the 288, has a VGA input. Has anyone tried the VGA input vs. the component input of the 288? Is VGA a digital or analog source? Thanks for any advice.

 

[michael%c]

I just ordered the 628 which is a DVD Recorder. Because this is a relatively new model, I spoke to Yama tech support about it and they thought it would be as good if not better than the 288 in terms of PQ. At the price I got it for it was a steal. I'll get it in a few weeks and hope its as good as everyone says.