Sharp DV-600U – I also added the Sharp model DV-600U model to the system of units as it was incredibly low priced for a moderately packed unit. The $300 price tag added with a $50 three year warranty made this unit a worthwhile buy. The unit us purely gray market, but it doesn’t matter with the extended warranty in place. The unit is about 2/3 the size of the typical unit and it also plays VCD’s so that was a bonus. The unit does not do enhanced black or pass 96/24 audio like the more expensive units, but it does do DTS and it also has both a coax and a toslink audio output. There is also a component video output that is switchable with the S-video and composite. The back does not duplicate outputs. The menu system is very bare bones and the remote control is horribly cumbersome and very poorly thought out as a unit. In terms of user friendliness, the unit rates a 5/10, but for image quality, it is right up there with the two Toshibas. The resolution chart from AVIA shows about 490 lines of resolution where the Toshiba units show slightly more than 500 lines. The three units are virtually the same. It is amazing how small this table top unit is. In terms of image quality, the picture on screen differs slightly from the Toshiba in that the image is more yellow and less saturated. First I read about it and then by the second day, I saw it first hand. Playing back Return of the Dragon, after about 58 minutes into the film, the video started to slip behind the audio. The images started to exhibit a still and strobe effect. I stopped the disc and restarted it and it was gone. I am fortunate that the unit has an extended warranty and I will keep my eye out on this problem. The unit does seem to get hot after only a short time. I wonder if it is the ventilation of the unit or of the room itself. The skipping and stuttering can also be found while playing the Wing Commander disc through to the one hour point and you sit back and watch it go. I played the next disc Never Been Kissed and again after one hour, the audio slippage occurred and the stuttering. Later on, I played the Matrix and it played from beginning to end without a hitch. It dawned on me that the films that were glitching were all Fox titles and nothing else. It would suggest that it is a firmware problem in the Sharp unit or just something about the place that presses the DVD’s for Fox. So far, the player is holding up pretty well and it seems to be rather robust. I haven’t had any more problems, but it is because I know about the Fox titles and I purposely keep those discs away from the machine. The remote’s commands are easily transferred over to the TC 1000 remote helping to make the unit much more friendly to use. Another glitch for the player. I put the Supergirl disc in and the player would not even read the disc. It would whirl and whirl for a short time and then spit the disc out. Something about this disc did not agree with the player. Other discs continue to play fine.
Pioneer DV-414 – I bought this unit in Los Angeles and gave it to Aunt Margaret as a gift. I wanted to do something nice for her and yet keep it to a gift that did not have to keep on giving like a satellite subscription. The unit was an open box special and it was quite a bit less than the price of a new unit. The player looked and played fine although I felt that the remote had a few things left to be desired. It other ways, the unit had a very sturdy build like a tank most unlike most other units.
Creative DVD-ROM 2x Player – This one came from Fry’s for just under $100 U.S. It was a factory refurbished unit that the store had gotten a lot of quantity on and was trying to sell. The unit works very nicely though and it outputs a very solid picture through its TV outputs. The cinematic experience of watching films on DVD-ROM just isn’t there and the image never looks quite right. The fact that the player is only 2x is irrelevant for DVD video purposes since all movies play at the specified 1x speed. The faster drives are for data access and transfer only.
SD-5109 – This is the year for DVD players and I have bought too many. I have added my ultimate DVD player, the Toshiba progressive scan unit. Its bigger brother the SD-9100 is more sturdy in terms of build quality, but it’s something that costs twice as much as this unit for the same performance. It has only one feature that this unit lacks which I will miss and that is an internal color setting for the output so that I do not have to readjust the RPTV every time I watch a DVD. This unit is the functional equivalent of the SD-3109 unit except that it includes the progressive scan output. I have only so far found one glaringly stupid omission on this unit and it is the missing scan buttons on both the remote and the front panel. I can forgive the front panel since most companies drop those keys from the front panel anyway. There is no way to scan forward or back on the disc during playback. You can only do a reverse play option at 1X if you missed something and wanted to pop back to see what you missed. The only solution appears to be chapter skip backwards and that is both cumbersome and totally inaccurate as it could very well bounce you back 15 minutes when you really only wanted to go back 3 minutes. So you have to watch another 12 minutes before reaching the stuff that you missed. There is a solution for this but it was only a fortunate happenstance. The remote for the SD-2109 works just fine with this unit and its scan codes work fine on the 5109 unit. The 2X, 8X and 30X scan functions are all there neatly hidden away. For those that do not have a previous Toshiba DVD player, the Cinema 7 remote will work nicely in its place and it will give you scanning capability. I have to wonder what the Toshiba engineers were thinking when they missed this major feature. Someone dropped the ball. But enough about the cosmetics of the unit, how does it perform? I’m happy to report that it performs as advertised and then some. As I was putting it through its paces, the unit showed me some things that made my jaw drop to the floor. I put up both the resolution patterns found on the AVIA disc and the outputted resolution via the progressive component output was 540 lines. There was no mistaking that … anyway I looked at it, it was 540 lines. I’m thinking that if the chart pattern could have gone to 600 lines or more … the TV and the player would have been able to resolve that too. Reality check set in and I popped over to the interlaced component input on the TV and the resolution was back down to same 500 –510 lines that I had seen before on the SD-2109 unit. I went to the S-video input and the chart was hovering at the 500 line mark and the same with the composite input. It was very cool indeed to be able to see four different outputs from the same machine to give you an indication about how the different outputs compare. It’s good to know that the TV is also well capable of showing much more than even this DVD is capable of. “To infinity and beyond.” Remember that the lines from AVIA and VE are defined as TV lines of resolution as in “Per picture height.” The 540 lines means 720 lines across the width of the 1.33:1 screen. The Snell and Wilcox pattern on the Video Essentials disc surprisingly or not has never looked better. All the TV’s line doubler decoding errors appear to have been completely eliminated. The pattern was pretty solid as it bounced around the screen. The TV’s line doubler shows the ball as a mess of confetti when ever the ball moves. Blame the line doubler, but for a commercial TV and the price point, I cannot really fault the TV or it’s line doubler. The colors are also surprisingly more vivid than through the other inputs even when I’ve equalized all the settings. The smile on one’s face when you push the envelope just a little more … it isn’t chicken feed. And now the separate bonus, my Proscan PS34190 16:9 tube set from many years ago has been sitting dormant of late especially after I got the TP61H95 unit. The $4000 set (for me) has been waiting for something to come along all these years that would use its High Resolution inputs. Other than a semi-successful test with hooking up a computer to this TV to create images that brought tears to one’s eye, the High Resolution inputs have been quiet. Even RCA didn’t know what to do with them at the time, but I thank their foresight into giving this set a switchable RGB/Progressive Component input literally years before the advent of DVD players. This set first showed up in 1993 and was sold more as a technology statement than anything else. It was cool and it cost a cool $5000 US at the time. But for its day and age, it had a rather primitive line doubler which produced exceedingly soft images. Broadcast TV and Satellite and even Laserdiscs just didn’t look very good on the set at all. Only with the arrival of 16:9 enhanced DVD’s did the potential for this set surface briefly. Needless to say, the first TV I plugged the 5109 into was the Proscan and not the Toshiba. I had to know if the input would work with this older piece of technology. I’ve searched the web for years trying to find answers which were never there. It came down to this final moment. The 5109 was plugged into the Proscan and I turned the TV on and moved it to the High Resolution mode. Nothing. Before panic and disappointment set in, I remembered that the RGB/Component input was switchable so I reached behind the set and found the all powerful switch. Click. Taking a step back and there it was. Years in the making … my Holy Grail … the progressive component signal from the 5109 was indeed compatible with this Proscan. The line doubler was bypassed for the first time ever. The image sang in its brilliant colours and detail. The progressive output also bypasses the TV’s colour decoder. Then the problem showed up, the image was experiencing jitter. Was it the player or was it the TV? Maybe there was a compatibility issue. I turned the set off and on again and the jitter stopped. I surmise that when I switched the RGB switch to Component, a reboot of the TV was necessary. Seems it was. And now I breathed life into the remaining embers of the set … The next generation of progressive players will upconvert the 480P data into 540P data and can possibly be detected by the TV as a 1080I high definition signal, thus forcing the set into the HD mode and hence 16:9 compression.
A couple of things to note … the remote is not much better than the first generation SD-3006 remote and it seems to be able to do even less than that previous remote. I spoke too soon on the jitter problem. It was not solved and is the remaining obstacle to a great picture. I figured out how to eliminate the jitter, but it tends to be disc specific and it has to do with the Y plug from the component input. Do not plug it in all the way and the jitter stops. Only the long prong has to make contact. If the outer ring makes contact with the input metal, the jitter starts. I do not know why this is, but the cure has been discovered. If only I could find a way to make it stop. The remote does have scan functions afterall, but it is imbedded with the chapter skip controls making for one big pain when trying to scan through programming.
AIRFORCE ONE Columbia / Tri Star
| A050 |
8.0 |
2.35 16×9; 1.33 |
5.1 |
Extras |
DVD-10 |
Category: Fantasy / Documentary / TV / Action
This one will come from Costco or some other Canadian location because the Canadian pricing is simply better for some titles anyway. This one has commentary from the director. This one has turned out to the highest selling DVD ever. As apparent from the images provided, this one is shot in the Super 35 format and cropped to make the 2.35 aspect ratio shown in the theaters. The special effects are cropped in the full frame version. The desired version is still the theatrical framing. I have to fine the time to watch this one. The trailer is included in this version of the film as in the commentary from the director. I watched it first finally … and then I remembered that this was a Columbia effort and I had to switch it to 5.1 manually. I knew the beginning sounded flat so I had to go back and rewatch the opening sequence. Sounded much more alive. The effects were definitely all over the place. There are actually three people involved in the commentary … a narrator that helps to push the commentary along so that the track does not get stale. They appeared to have a lot of fun with this commentary track. He asks Wolfgang all the right questions. This commentary rates a solid 8.5 of 10 … better than the Platoon mess with Oliver Stone or the Mortal Kombat stuff. BOSS films was involved in the effects work for this film, but they shut down shortly after the completion of the film. This one looks great and the sound track is most definitely demo material. The final effects sequence of the 747 crashing into the water is just as unconvincing as when I first saw it. Computer graphics still need to go a little ways to bring this type of simulation to life. The director also mentions that he had wanted jet dog fights recreated in the computer, but the technology was not there to be able to properly simulate that. Cannot believe the crash of the plane cost $800,000 to do. All in computing time … but still. So Kevin Costner was the first person they approached to be the president. Did not quite work out that way. A funny demonstration of the use of bass shakers involved this film. Even the closing of the car door created a vibration in the seat. I called that out as totally unnecessary.
AIRPLANE! Paramount
| A055 |
5.5 |
1.85 16×9 |
5.1 |
Extras |
Single Layer |
Category: Fantasy / Comedy / Documentary / TV / Action
I got this one from Future Shop and the image quality is just not very good for this 1980 film. The source material is enhanced for 16:9, but the material is worn out. The audio has been remixed for 5.1. Extras include a lone trailer and commentary track by four people. They all just sit around and reminisce about the history of the film and many of the in-jokes. About 30 minutes in, they seem to run out of gas a bit and the commentary track gets quiet for a time. It picks up later though.
Continued in Part 2
