One thing that immediately hits you when you pop in a DVD and play it, is the player's
stunning picture quality.
Faroudja's DCDi video processor does an incredible job making the picture as clear and sharp as possible. Upscaling to a higher resolution is practically flawless and it's almost impossible to tell the original DVD content was mastered in a lower resolution. When I set the player's output to 576p (effectively switching off the player's upscaler) my TV took over the upscaling process. It wasn't anywhere near the same quality as what the DVD-1920 was capable off. And this is exactly the reason why I chose a DVD player with upscaling capabilities.
Of course source matters and the DVD-1920 won't magically turn all DVD content into the same high quality viewing experience. If the source sucks to begin with, the end-result will be poor too.
By default, the colors were slightly too "rich" for my taste, but the DVD-1920 offers ample adjustment options. By adjusting the contrast and gamma
1) a bit, I was able to make the picture just right for my personal taste. In case you wonder why you would want to change these settings on your player and not your TV: It is because setting it on the player means it will carry over to
all video outputs (remember I had the player connected through S-Video, Component Video and HDMI?). Also, my TV only has a single HDMI input and I'm pretty sure I will need a HDMI switcher in the future if I ever decide on a good DVR. Changing these settings on the TV would change the settings for the DVR as well then, since the player and the DVR will be sharing the same HDMI input.
My one disappointment was that during playback the image froze for about 2 seconds during layer changes. Since so little extra memory is needed to prevent layer changes to be visible, I'm surprised the machine doesn't have that capability. Perhaps it's because with most newer disks, they have chosen the layer to change in between scenes, so you don't notice it anyway. In any case, it would have been a nice extra.
HDMI vs. Component Video
If you read up on other users' opinions and reviews, you'll notice there's a lot of debate going on about which output on this player gives the better picture quality, the
HDMI (digital) output, or the
Component Video (analog) output.
Well in my opinion, it's a matter of taste. I noticed the colors on the Component Video output were
slightly richer, but simply tweaking the HDMI output settings can minimize this difference. In any case, there's one undeniable advantage of using HDMI over Component Video on this player. Only the HDMI output is capable of the
High Definition resolutions on this player. The Component Video maxes out at 625p, while the HDMI output can upscale to 720p and 1080i too. And let me tell you, the difference is pretty apparent. On the Component output I was able to spot
some jagged edges here and there, while the HDMI output was almost flawless. On TVs smaller than 42" or non HDTV-ready TVs this difference might not be noticeable, but on my 50-incher, it was
very obvious.
1) I'm not sure the US version of the DVD-1920 has a Gamma setting. I obviously have the European version.
Copyright © 2006 - BuzzyPedia.com
