This is perhaps the lowest-priced serious progressive player we've seen.
While the MSRP is $119, we bought ours at Best Buy for $69. This player is using
an all-in-one chip from Cirrus Logic. The chip does MPEG decoding,
deinterlacing, and video encoding (digital/analog conversion of the video). From
what we understand, the cost of the Cirrus Logic chip alone is around $20 in
lots of 10,000. Someone is not making any money on this player.
Deinterlacing
The Cirrus Logic chip had the same issues as most of the other combined MPEG
decoder/deinterlacers we've seen - it's a flag reader, and failed most of the
deinterlacing tests that involve flag patterns other than the standard NTSC 3-2
film pulldown.
Amazingly, it wouldn't go to film mode on material that was encoded with the
extremely common "alternating progressive flag" problem unless we forced it into
film mode. There's no excuse for this. There must be hundreds of films with this
problem, including many huge hits like Titanic, Austin Powers, and Monsters
Inc. In fact, all of the players passed this test in shootout 1. We assumed
that every chipset was designed to deal with this problem properly, so we
stopped running the test in shootout 2. If we hadn't (just for grins) run the
test again on this DVD player, we might never have found out that there are
still players that fail to recognize this issue. Clearly, we can't assume that
every chipset manufacturer has done their homework.
The Basics
What do you expect when you pay $69 for a DVD player? The biggest surprise
for us was that this player does NOT have the Chroma Upsampling Error CUE). That
pretty much throws down the gauntlet - if they can make a player with no chroma
error for $69 retail, there's no excuse for any other manufacturers not to fix
it.
White on this player is extremely low at 72 IRE, instead of the standard 100
IRE. You will really need to crank contrast up on your display, which will of
course cause all the other inputs to have horrible white clipping, unless you
can dedicate a separate memory on your display just for this DVD player. This
player is one of two players in shootout 3 that is not capable of reproducing
below black picture information. We used to think that below black was only used
for standard PLUGE test patterns for setting black level, but it turns out that
hard clipping the below-black information causes odd artifacts in shadow areas.
Many films have shadow details encoded below black. When the player clips them
off, they're lost for good and no tweaking of the display can cure it.
The video on this player is soft! We wonder if the anti-imaging filters were
optimized for 480i instead of 480p, which would explain the steep roll-off. The
player is down 1 dB at 6 MHz. It is down a little over 2 dB at 8.36 MHz. And
finally it is down 3.56 dB at 10 MHz.
The layer change is ultra fast and we estimate it takes around .1 seconds.
However the player is a bit schizophrenic on overall performance. Sometimes it
jams from one menu to the next while other times it takes seconds. It also takes
a long time to load a DVD. We rate the overall performance as a 2.
Both the Y-Pb and Y-Pr YC delay are also greater than 5ns. There are 2 pixels
cropped from the top, 1 from the bottom, 5 from the left and 0 from the right.
Overall this player is somewhat better than we expected, given the price. Still, we'd
certainly recommend spending a few dollars more to buy something that gets more
of the details correct.
