Comments for Denon DVD-2500BTCI Blu-ray Player - Benchmark at http://www.hometheaterhifi.com , comment 1 to 22 out of 20 comments http://www.hometheaterhifi.com Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:31:04 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1192 Okay - it seems you can do low-rez output of SD-DVDs via HDMI, its just not auto-detected. You have to go through some menu's first. So that isn't soooo bad, but it should have auto-detect mode. I've been reading that several of these companies are slow to do auto-detect and pure-passthrough because of the 'extra' content, that may not be at the same rate as the movie itself. You have to do pure-passthrough very carefully, or you get lots of flickering when changing between modes, which people don't like. That said, it certainly can be done, Pioneer has implemented it quite well. - anon Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:36:31 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1097 Where are the Blu-Ray benchmarks going to be located? Melded in with the SD? As of 9/25, this is the only one, right? I've found your tests invaluable over the past several years. I'm thrilled to see you going blu. All I can ask is, hurry up . Seriously. - Scott Fri, 26 Sep 2008 05:12:44 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1090 Otto: I actually agree completely. Having read a lot about the hardware side, I assumed it would have a pure passthrough mode. It doesn't! Crazy... Denon might fix with patch, they did patch something about 24 cadence during the review above. I hope they will... It is currently an awkward feature set that doesn't really make sense. I also agree above with the person who says they should do SD tests on all of the players, I just wanted people to realize most won't buy this player for SD upconversion. My comment was more at the readers of the magazine that to the magazine itself. What is ironic is that right now the only 'real' transport, then, is the Pioneer. And it has expensive Wolfson DACs inside... That as a transport you won't use....... ever.... So, I change my advice to Denon, now it consists of: 1) Implement 'pure passthrough' 2) BR 2.0 compliant 3) Reduce price by 200 (100 at least!) Now we're talking!!!! - anon Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:21:56 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1075 anon: Yes, it is marketed as purely a transport, BUT in my opinion Denon failed BADLY in designing a pure transport, since there is no way to automatically output the format that's on the disc (Pioneer has this feature, and hence is a better transport than this). In short, this player does NOT deliver an untouched signal to your VP - quite the contrary, it renders your VP useless. This becomes even more important due to the fact that the player apparently fails 1080i de-interlacing, so even for blu-ray, it only works flawlessly with 1080P discs. Yes, I know, there are not many 1080i discs outthere yet, but they will increase in numbers, and this is a thousand buck transport after all, so it should work on any disc outthere. In my opinion, the DVD-2500BD is a really, really bad design, unless Denon manages to deliver a firmware update that provides a source direct feature like Pioneer, to allow the player to deliver the signal without any processing. Without this feature, this is a bad choice in ANY system, if you want to use it for anything other than playing 1080P blu-ray discs. - Otto Sat, 20 Sep 2008 02:31:51 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1070 JEJ- Please continue to include SD (upscaling) performance as part of your BR test suite. I am not sure where you get "most of us" but I will not be filling my rack with multiple players. My SD player is OLD and waiting to be replaced with something worthy. Also, I see BR technolgy as at-risk. I don't mind paying for it as long as I can fall-back on the player's SD performance. Please benchmark and let the buyer decide. Thanks, - ws Thu, 18 Sep 2008 04:36:39 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1069 Yes, some people don't understand what this player is for. This is not a full featured player, this is a transport. It is absolutely great for what it is intended for. If you don't have a Reala/SiliconOptix filled AVR and want good SD, then this isn't the player for you - yes, that is true. (Just as if you don't own a separate DAC then a CD transport would do you no good. Unless you like the way it looks.) I have a VPPro-type scaler, and I want untouched output from a DVD player, and that is what this offers. The poster above me mentions this, but I want to re-iterate and drill this into people. Now - Denon - update it for BR2.0 (ethernet and SD slot) and lower the price by 200, release by Jan/Feb and we have a deal :). Oh - one more comment on the transport issue - to really nail down how this works - this device has only *one* output on the back. 1 HDMI connection. Extremely clean. - anon Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:41:20 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1068 "drive tray is coated with a special protein"...give me a break! How can Secrets fall for this nonsense? For a thousand dollars you can get an Oppo 983 for much superior SD performance and one of several comparable Blu-ray players and have a few hundred left over to buy DVDs. - Charles Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:50:15 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1067 Typically the Secrets benchmark uses a waveform monitor to measure Y/C delay, Levels, and Frequency Response which gives a good indication as to the quality in which a player will pass the analog signal to an external scaler/decoder. In the 2500's case there were no analog outputs. Future players that have analog outputs will be tested. The selection of resolutions will also be addressed in future reviews. - AdrianW Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:17:21 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1064 Thank you for the review that I have read with great interest, I hope that from now on there will be more Blu-Ray players featured in Secrets. I think that there are more than a few readers on this site who have a very good deinterlacing/scaling solution with their standalone scaler, receiver, preamp or display. To feed such a device the player "only" has to output what is on the disc, which in most cases I think will be 480i, 576i, 1080i and 1080p material. All Blu-Ray players I have seen so far (4) could not output what is on the disc untouched, on top of that most had to be switched back and forth between different fixed output resolutions to circumvent them from upcaling DVDs and all of them could NOT output 480i and 576i either which is especially unfortunate as 3 of them had inferior SD deinterlacing performance. It would be nice to know if a player would be able to serve as that kind of transport without having to switch around output resolutions and without any artefacts like chroma upsampling errors and of course with a proper frequency response that according to a German print magazine is even a bit weaker with the Denon for 1920x1080. To my knowledge the two new Pioneer players have a "native" mode that accomplishes exactly that, I think they are even able to output 4:2:2 bits as opposed to 4:4:4 that is used by other solutions as a default or as the only available mode. I am not so sure how to put this into every test, maybe a primer on what test parameters apply for readers who are looking for such a player would be nice and also information about available output resolutions and bit depths and a "native" mode in the tests should be possible the latter is not always something that works as it should according to the user manual. - Oliver K Tue, 16 Sep 2008 23:47:55 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1063 It will be interesting to see the Oppo offering, which may be out late this year/early next year. Have you heard anything more about a launch date JEJ? I'm trying to hold off until then. Hopefully they will provide similar HD performance to their outstanding DVD performance. Jim - Jim O Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:42:04 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1062 Denon has the 3800 which has Realta processing that adresses SD playback. An ethernet port and 1gb of onboard memory adds BD-Live capability but we still really haven't seen BD-Live take off yet. - AdrianW Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:55:22 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1061 A Blu-ray player should be judged primarily for its Blu-ray operation. Most of us already have a good SD DVD player and we buy a Blu-ray player to add HD to our home theater system. You don't have to throw away your old SD DVD player. Use them both to do what each does best. - JEJ Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:02:32 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1059 I'm suprised Denon wouldn't even care about standard DVD playback, and no ethernet connection. Are Denon mad? This is a disgrace, I definately will not be buying this Blu-ray player. - Carl Mulder Tue, 16 Sep 2008 10:38:41 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1058 Adrian is already testing the next Blu-ray player and others are in the que. We will get them done as quickly as possible. All the manufacturers are anxious to have their latest models included in our new Blu-ray Benchmark. We won't be testing the 3800 because Denon has several models newer than the 3800, and there is just not enough time. Adrian's storage room for players arriving is already filling up. Suffice it to say that THE SECRETS DVD PLAYER BENCHMARK IS BACK! - JEJ Tue, 16 Sep 2008 08:33:06 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1057 I consider the Denon 3800/Marantz 8002 to be the best BD player you can buy right now for both audio and video quality. The only other contender even rumored to be on the same playing field is Pioneer's upcoming 09 player, and that won't be out until at least December (w/o DTS-HD MA decoding in box). Truly a shame, JJ. :( - EWL5 Tue, 16 Sep 2008 07:54:29 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1056 Here's another BR player that has mediocre SD performance... JJ, we need a flood of reviews from you! There are more new players coming this fall and you guys have just scratched the surface of the summer batch! - ws Tue, 16 Sep 2008 03:49:28 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1053 Thanks for doing this. I'm looking forward to your upcoming Blu-ray player reviews. - FiguredMaple Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:54:38 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1052 We have a lot of Blu-ray players on the way for Benchmark reviews. There are newer Denons than the 3800 and we will likely focus on those because of time limitations. The 2500 is not a new player, but we used it as a model for developing the tests and it took a long time to get that one done. In any case, we finally have the Benchmark procedures for Blu-ray players ready to go. There will be some additional tests included in future reviews as they are developed, but the basic DVD Blu-ray Player Benchmark is complete. - JEJ Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:06:52 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1051 we going to see a followup review of the 3800? - jim Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:34:23 +0100 http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/dvd-players/439-a-secrets-dvd-blu-ray-player-benchmark-review.html#comment-1050 Any chance you guys will be reviewing the Denon 3800BDCI next? ;) - EWL5 Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:27:26 +0100