DVD Players

Toshiba XD-E500 DVD Player – Benchmark

I can remember a time when Toshiba offered entry level DVD players and also high dollar flagship models like the SD-9200. As DVD players became a commodity Toshiba logically focused on mainstream consumer players much like the XD-E500 reviewed here.  The XD-E500 is a main stream DVD player priced at $99.99 and offering the features a player of this price offers. This includes the obvious DVD playback, the almost universal support amongst new DVD players for DivX playback, Mp3 and WMA.

Denon DVD-2500BTCI Blu-ray Player – Benchmark

The DVD-2500BTCI is one of several Blu-ray players that Denon is offering in their current lineup.  Unlike the  DVD -3800BDCI which features a Realta HQV video processing solution and internal decoding of Dolby TrueHD and dts-HD Master Audio, the DVD-2500BTCI is billed as a digital-only transport that offers playback of BD discs as well as output of  the audio signals on the disc in raw bitstream format using its HDMI 1.3a compliant connection.

Classe CDP-502 DVD Player

For a player as expensive as it is, the Classé CDP-502 could stand for some improvement in its core video performance.  Its de-interlacer performance is very good though, and the National Semiconductor AVC 2510 chip set handles most material very well, as there were really only a few minor hiccups it experienced in our DVD Player Benchmark™ tests. It would be hard for me to recommend this DVD player based on its video performance alone, but people in the market for a player in this price class will undoubtedly be looking at it for its ultra high-end audio performance. That, combined with a robust video feature set and the ability to up-convert any material to various HD resolutions through HDMI, makes the CDP-502 an impressive offering overall.