The Cynic Says……

Yes, really… I FINALLY bought a dedicated DVD player. I had, for the longest time, been using my PS2 as my DVD player. I have a 32″ LCD HDTV and while it didn’t look too bad, the PS2 just isn’t a standalone DVD player. I have it connected via component cables so it was able to do progressive scan output but that’s still just 480p. After looking at a few options (mostly the Oppo 971HD), I happened to be at Best Buy and found the Pioneer DV-400V 1008p upscaling DVD player. It has HDMI output and upscales ordinary DVD’s to a maximum 1080p resolution (though it also does 720p and 1080i). It also plays DIVX and WMV files burned on to a disc along with having a USB port through which it can play these filetypes as well. I decided it looked like a pretty good deal @ $99 and took it home with me….

I got it home to hook it up and discovered my one and only real beef with it so far: no optical-digital output. It uses coaxial-digital instead. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s no real difference in sound quality that I can tell so I don’t care THAT much. It’s just that my other stuff is hooked up via optical and I kinda wanted to keep things the same. Oh, well… I dealt with it and moved on. Connected the HDMI output to my TV, went through the initial setup and put in a DVD to watch. We rented Apocalypto and decided to try that out since it seemed like a good title to run the player through its paces. I set the DVD player to my LCD’s native resolution of 720p and proceeded to enjoy the movie…. I’m not really sure if it looks any better than the PS2 since I didn’t do any direct comparisons, but I will say that it did look absolutely fantastic! I didn’t notice any tearing or other types of weirdness with the picture at all… I did really enjoy the “last position memory” feature since I had to stop the disc a couple of times for various reasons. Press stop one time and it stops the disc but remembers where you were in the disc so when you press play it starts right back up where you left off. Pretty sweet. The remote is very easy to use and laid out pretty well. Not 100% perfect but about as good as I’ve seen anywhere else, honestly. The one thing that struck me as odd is the fact that the player is black but the remote is white. I’m not really sure why they’ve done that but whatever. Maybe it makes it easier to find? I know it doesn’t quite fit in with everything else I have. My receiver, TV, TV stand, coffee table, PS2, Gamecube, speakers and subwoofer are all black. My TV remote is silver, though now that I think about it. Anyway, I digress… Point is, the DVD player kicks some serious ass and I can’t wait to throw more stuff at it to see how it looks on my TV.

On a side note, I’ve decided I’m going to have to get a new receiver soon. I’m tired of having 900 wires going all over the goddamn place and my current receiver doesn’t upconvert, nor does it have HDMI. That’s for a later date and time, though. We’ll see how that works out. I’ve decided I either want Pioneer Elite or Yamaha. More geek stuff to come!

Here’s a pic of the DVD player, thanks to Pioneer’s site.