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DVD Players Denon DVD-2500BTCI Blu-ray Player - Benchmark
DVD Players Denon DVD-2500BTCI Blu-ray Player - Benchmark
DVD Players
| Denon DVD-2500BTCI Blu-ray Player - Benchmark |
| Written by Adrian Wittenberg |
| Sunday, 14 September 2008 17:00 |
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Page 5 of 5
Conclusions Denon’s BD2500BTCI Transport is a solid product that has very smooth operation and is likely to withstand manyyears of use due to its high build quality. When coupled with an AV processor that has additional video processing and support for the latest HD sound codecs it represents an excellent Blu-ray solution for home theater. While there is a trade-off with mediocre standard DVD performance the BD2500BTCI Transport performed very well as intended and it is a very attractive offering from Denon. Comments (22)
BD2500BTCI
written by TRT , September 15, 2008 So what does this all mean? Is it a better solution than the PS3?
Pros and Cons
written by AdrianW , September 15, 2008 What you are paying for here is build quality with a top notch drive transport, HD Audio bitsream output, Denon's high level of customer service and support, integration with other Denon components, etc. Whether or not that's "better" than the PS3 is all up to what is important to you.
3800BDCI
written by EWL5 , September 15, 2008 Any chance you guys will be reviewing the Denon 3800BDCI next? ;)
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written by JEJ , September 15, 2008 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.
DVD Blu-ray Player Benchmark
written by FiguredMaple , September 15, 2008 Thanks for doing this. I'm looking forward to your upcoming Blu-ray player reviews.
need more reviews... faster.
written by ws , September 16, 2008 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!
King of the Hill not to be benchmarked?!!
written by EWL5 , September 16, 2008 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. :(
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written by JEJ , September 16, 2008 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!
Garbage
written by Carl Mulder , September 16, 2008 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.
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written by JEJ , September 16, 2008 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.
Product Line
written by AdrianW , September 16, 2008 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.
Oppo's Offering
written by Jim O , September 17, 2008 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
performance/functionality when feeding another scaling/deinterlacing solution ?
written by Oliver K , September 17, 2008 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.
Tektronix Measurements
written by AdrianW , September 18, 2008 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.
Very poor value!
written by Charles , September 18, 2008 "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.
Hey, its a transport people!
written by anon , September 18, 2008 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.
Please include SD performance
written by ws , September 18, 2008 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,
It may be a transport, but...
written by Otto , September 20, 2008 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.
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written by anon , September 24, 2008 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!!!!
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written by Scott , September 26, 2008 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.
manual changeover
written by anon , November 04, 2008 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. Write comment
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