This player uses the FLI2200, and had performance similar to other players with that chip. Recovery time from video to film mode was too high for us to give full marks, and NTSC 2-2 pulldown wasn't handled, which isn't a huge issue for the USA. This player does offer the ability to enable NTSC 2-2 pulldown, but when enabled we saw field inversion on our test disc. They do not let you invert the fields manually so we don’t know if that would have solved our problem. Otherwise, it passed with flying colors.

The Basics

Most of the time, this player does not have the Chroma Upsampling Error. Krell is using the same LSI MPEG decoder that is found in the Proceed PMDT and several Sony DVD players like the 7700 and 9000. Unlike the Sony players, the Krell does not have the chroma bug with "standard" 3-2 encoded DVDs. The problem the Krell has is on DVDs encoded with alternating progressive flags, see image below. You will have to look close to see it, sorry it is so small. This is a simulation of what it looks like. It is much larger when viewed in person. You will probably not see it on the 480p out because of the filtering in the FLI2200, but if you feed the 480i into an external processor as we did, it will become obvious. If the external processor is also using the FLI2200, then it will probably masked. In this case, they switch upsampling methods every frame, which results in a noticeable and annoying flicker. The FLI2200 will mask this on the 480p output, but if you plug it into an external processor, it's obnoxious. This is something that could be corrected, but would require some work.

When casually looking at the sharpness pattern on Avia, this DVD player provided the least amount of ringing. The Avia pattern is a severe test in this area. This suggests that the analog anti-imaging filters used after the DACs are exemplary.

The DVD Standard is using a 54 MHz DAC and it outperformed the Denon DVD-9000, Pioneer 47Ai, and Sony DVP-NS999ES, which are all using 108 MHz DACs. This goes to show just how important the analog video section is. The higher sampling DACs are supposed to make analog filtering easier, but clearly a good job can be done with a lower-frequency DAC. (It is a form of upsampling, just like that used for audio DACs.)

The white level on the Krell was just about perfect and well within spec. The DVD Standard also had the flattest frequency response of all players tested in shootout 3. The DVD Standard is also capable of reproducing below black picture information.

However, not all is perfect on this player, at least not yet. While Y-Pr was below 5ns, Y-Pb was >30ns. The Kenwood from Shootout 2 suffered from the same problem and we believe that, like the Kenwood, this can be solved with a firmware update.

Krell has provided at least one firmware update since we first received the player, which exposed the chroma enhancement controls in the FLI2220. Since the chroma enhancement features are controversial (we prefer them set low or off), this update was in our opinion a good thing.

There is a menu option called animation mode. We believe this is supposed to toggle the cross-color suppression (CCS) feature off and on, but currently it does not do anything. The CCS is set to on at the moment. With it in this position you will see flickering on some saturated reds like those found in Toy Story.

Pixel cropping on this player is severe. 13 samples are cropped from the left side of the image, which we think is well beyond any standard of reasonableness. Aside from the fact that picture information is being lost unnecessarily, the fact that it's all from one side shifts the image noticeably.

Next to the WMC PC, this had the fastest layer change of any DVD player we have seen. It even nudged out the Denon and Meridian in terms of speed. We estimate it takes around .1 seconds under the worst case scenario.

We gave the DVD Standard a 4.5 in response time. It would have received a 5, but we felt the next-chapter skip was not as fast as the Denon or Meridian.

This is overall a generally good player, verging on excellent. The pixel cropping is disappointing, and we hope that a future update will provide a working animation mode, a fix for the chroma upsampling on alternating flag material, and a fix for the Y-Pb delay problem. In a player at this price point, we think it's only reasonable to expect these details to be done right.