OT: good DVD player with progressive output etc?

[Pekka]

If you have any insights or experiences of DVD players with progressive output (just bought a Panasonic TX-32PD30 T[tau] Quintrix wide TV) let me know. Don't need recording.

Harman Kardon DVD 22 looks pretty decent. Is it?

Also, I'm looking for a useable Digital Satelliite receiver - we got a big dual head dish pointed to Astra and Eutelsat (AFAIK) but I'm pretty clueless which receiver is "good enough" - I don't want to get a Dreambox and spend more time configuring than watching.

[Moppie]

I went through the whole need a DVD player thing earlier in the year.

I spent about 2 days looking on the internet and seattled on a Pioneer.

With out spending huge dollars on something exotic then it appears that Sony and Pioneer make the best DVD players on the market.
I choose the Pioneer because it seemed to have the most useable extras, including the ablity to show JPEGs from a folder structure and play a variety of media files including MPEG and WMF as well as AVI etc.


And don't forget to look at DVD writers as well, they are becoming more and more affordable (depending on your budget) and appear to be a true replacement for the VCR.


And of course have a search in www.google.com I found several sites that compared DVD players in a style to dpreview.com, which proved very helpful in narrowing down my choice.

[dtrayers]

Here's all you need to know about progressive DVD players. It was updated over the summer:

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_7_3/dvd-benchmark-introduction-9-2000.html

I have the Pioneer DV-563A. I don't know if it has been superceeded. It rates pretty high and is reasonable in cost. I'm only interested in the video aspects of DVD players. I know that there are better models if you are into the audio features.

If you have a HDTV, you might be interested in the Samsung HD-931 which has DVI output.

Lastly, Denon is consistantly ranked very high.

[theflyingkiwi]

I have got a sony DVP-NS730p and found it to be great. the dvd player is zone free out of the box, which helps since I have a small number of zone 1 dvd's.

in the manual it says to the effect that progressive scan works with component video, svideo and line out are not effected.

one of the things that I am looking for is a component out to scart.

[Aylwin]

Ahhh, home theater and DVD. This was my main hobby for a few years before I discovered the wonders of DSLR photography. :)

Value for money-wise, it's hard to beat a Pioneer. Many models to choose from and they're easy to hack (make region free). If you're interested in good video quality, I'd recommend not going lower than the DV-575.

For video quality, other good brands are Denon and Marantz. The Harman Kardon DVD player has very good audio quality. It has particularly good CD playback quality for a DVD player. I'm not sure about video quality though.

I'm not a big fan of Sony DVD players, especially the lower end models. The lower end ones don't give very accurate colors. I think they tend to over saturate them. The higher end models are much better. I just don't like them because they usually don't support DVD-Audio (of course, Sony will push for it's own SACD format).

[Moppie]

....... and they're easy to hack (make region free).


Virtualy every single DVD player now sold here in NZ is region free, dost matter if its an offical or parralell import.
Infact I don't know if you could find a zoned one anymore.

I wonder how wide spread this trend is? Its almost a must have here in NZ, about half the DVDs I watch are zone 1, we're zone 4 which dosnt get as much surport from publishers.

[Aylwin]

Virtualy every single DVD player now sold here in NZ is region free, dost matter if its an offical or parralell import.
Infact I don't know if you could find a zoned one anymore.

I wonder how wide spread this trend is? Its almost a must have here in NZ, about half the DVDs I watch are zone 1, we're zone 4 which dosnt get as much surport from publishers.

Well, it seems NZ is one of the lucky countries. It's same in many parts of Southeast Asia. In Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore (I'd assume Indonesia too), you can't buy a non-region free DVD player either. It's funny 'coz this is supposedly illegal but all the department stores and electronics shops carry region free players. For some strange reason though, they mostly sell single region players in the Philippines. You'd think they'd be as "advanced" as their neighbours.

In Japan, few people have even heard of multi-region players. In fact, most of them don't even know that there are different regions. Then again, who'd buy non-Japanese DVDs here (except for foreigners like myself)?

In Finland and in many other parts of Europe it's the same. "Legit" DVD players are region 2 only. UK is the exception though. It's very easy there to find hacked DVD players. In Finland, you might have to pay 100EUR or more to get your DVD player hacked and that of course voids the warranty. I've bought quite a bit of A/V stuff in Finland but I'd never buy a DVD player there.

In the US, I'd imagine they have no use for multi-region players. They have some of the cheapest prices there and region 1 DVD's usually have more features. Most of my own DVDs are region 1.

It's a shame it's not the same all around the world. This region thing is all to do with money and has no benefit to the consumer whatsoever.

[Ikinaa]

....... and they're easy to hack (make region free).


Virtualy every single DVD player now sold here in NZ is region free, dost matter if its an offical or parralell import.
Infact I don't know if you could find a zoned one anymore.

I wonder how wide spread this trend is? Its almost a must have here in NZ, about half the DVDs I watch are zone 1, we're zone 4 which dosnt get as much surport from publishers.


I guess it's about the same here in Luxembourg.
Last time I bought the sony 333 dvd-player and before installing it I looked on the internet for finding a region hack, didn't find one at this time, but found the (hand-made) marking 'ZF' (ZoneFree ?) on the outside of the box. No problems playing zone-1 or zone-2 dvds.
Since I've looked in some stores on the boxes and found the marking some times on different dvd players of different makings...