Guide to Buying a DVD Player

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DVD Quick Tips

By Staff Writer

The digital video disc (DVD) has earned loyalty among consumers by delivering high-quality digital pictures and an ever-increasing variety of sound options on a CD-sized disc. The DVD is currently state of the art in home theater playback. It's also a likely vehicle for replacing the venerable CD format with higher-resolution stereo and surround sound. After that, DVD may become the preferred means of hard-copy delivery for high-definition television. Rumors that DVD may run for president, achieve world peace and win the Nobel Prize could not be confirmed at press time.

How to buy a DVD player
General price guidelines
Configurations
Picture quality
Digital vs. digital
Audio
Feel
The future

How to buy a DVD player

All DVD players provide excellent picture and sound, although some decks are undoubtedly better than others. For most eyes and ears, the feature set, not the performance, differentiates DVD players. Although we wouldn't say that all DVD players look the same (they don't), or that they sound the same (they absolutely don't), most will provide excellent bang for the buck. More bucks usually buys more bells and whistles, rather than different picture and sound-producing componentry. Among those bells and whistles, however, may be useful picture adjustments and enhancements. Expect to find them at the upper-rank price points.

Also be aware that some of the more prominent features in DVD players may be superfluous to your system. For example, component video output is a hot DVD feature, but there are very few TV sets that accept this connection. Those that do are topflight models. Further, some decks earn their price points with features you may never use, such as a virtual surround sound effect (if you have a multichannel audio system, you won't need it) or picture zoom (which can be fun, but gets old fast).

In general, you can expect that an entry-level to mid-line player will provide satisfactory performance with most home theater systems. When you start moving up to the flagship models, you can expect to see the best of a manufacturer's technology, including more robust build quality, more pristine special effects and often better remote controls.

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General price guidelines

DVD players can range from a few hundred to several thousand dollars. In this wide price range, more money gets you sturdier construction, better sound quality (particularly in stereo), and such features as component output jacks, Dolby® Digital line outputs and virtual surround. Also expect to pay more (at least for now) for a changer or personal unit.

You can expect to pay a few hundred dollars for a basic, no-frills deck, but remember that these decks will generally have picture quality that's identical to that of the next model or two up in the line. Decks at the high end of the spectrum can cost over a thousand dollars. These are audiophile/videophile-grade components that are worth the investment only if the rest of your A/V system is commensurate with this level of gear.

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Configurations

Although most decks still accept only one disc at a time, DVD is going multi-disc (as the CD did). We're not sure if cueing-up multiple two-hour movies will ever become as popular as loading up a CD changer, but why slow the march of technology?

All DVD players also play CDs, though the format specs don't require CD compatibility. Manufacturers just want you to be happy. The speed of the transport mechanism and quality of the sound varies from player to player. Other playback formats usually supported include Video CD (an inferior predecessor to DVD) and, occasionally, the CD-R and CD-RW formats (don't count on this, though — players vary wildly in their acceptance of recorded blanks). The number of DVD/LD combination players (capable of playing laserdiscs as well) has dwindled to one. Laserdiscs are still being released, but the format's heyday is past. Though DVD has a distinct advantage in picture quality over LD, jettisoning a large laserdisc library in favor of DVDs may not be wise — at least not until DVD goes high-definition (see below).

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Picture quality

DVD is the reigning champ in picture quality when displayed on analog sets — and looks even better on digital sets. Its excellence is uniform. Just about any DVD player yields a really good picture that easily beats analog VHS and laserdisc.

Early DVD players had varying levels of video processing power. Recent models, however, seem to have settled on a standard level of 10 bits — so read the specs carefully when considering a discounted older model. To maximize picture quality through a digital TV insist on purchasing a model with component video output.

Here's one of the few other differentiating points: All DVD players have a multi-angle feature to let you see the action from more than one viewpoint, but not all have the cool picture zoom for close-up inspection.

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Digital vs. digital

Despite its power, DVD falls short of high-definition television (HDTV), at least for now. That's because, in digital terms, DVD is a standard-definition television (SDTV) format. In tech terms, it is designated 480p, meaning it delivers a 480-line picture. True HDTV is 720p or 1080i. The "p" in 480p refers to progressive scanning, and the "i" in 1080i stands for interlaced.

Because most people view DVDs on standard analog TV sets, they can't take advantage of its ability to trace a picture in one pass, which, incidentally, is also the way your computer monitor works.

Given the high quality and low price of the average DVD player (and the fact that a high-definition incarnation of DVD may be years away), this should not prevent anyone from buying a DVD player. How long do you want to wait before starting to enjoy your life? True film buffs love DVD and are eager to bury collections of blurry VHS tapes in the backyard.

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Audio

DVD players are more varied in their audio-for-video capabilities. All support Dolby Digital surround sound (as required by industry standards); some add Dolby Digital line outputs that connect the five surround channels (plus subwoofer) to a receiver or preamp that lacks a direct digital input jack. Most decks now support the rival dts® (Digital Theater Systems) format, which some audiophiles deem superior to Dolby Digital. Discs with dts soundtracks are still relatively rare, however. A handful of decks are THX-certified to conform with the refined surround aesthetic developed by the makers of "Star Wars."

An increasing number of DVD players feature a virtual surround function that simulates surround effects with just two channels. As a more common but little-advertised bonus, many decks play 96/24 stereo discs (also known as Digital Audio Discs or Advanced Audio Discs) in a 96 kHz, 24-bit format that sounds more refined than today's conventional 44 kHz, 16-bit compact discs. These discs are primarily only music, though there are a few 96/24 music videos. True 96/24 sound is usually available only through the analog outputs, however, meaning that the signal must go through the player's own digital-to-analog converter, whether or not that particular DAC is any good. To appease copyright holders, most people downconvert the 96/24 signal to a lower-quality 48/16 format through the digital outputs to prevent cloning of the high-quality signal. A surround-capable version called DVD-Audio (see below) is on the way.

Despite promising signs of record industry acceptance, it may be a while before DVD-Audio discs are available in large numbers. There are thousands of HDCD-compatible CDs out there right now, however — you may even unknowingly own a few — and a few DVD players can get the best out of this enhanced CD format. Keep that in mind if you plan to use your player for music listening through a high-end system.

Also, if you plan to use the digital outputs — to replace a cheap player's DAC with a better outboard unit, for instance — your player must have either an optical or a coaxial output, preferably both. The qualitative difference between these is narrow, but the former requires special fiber-optic cable (given Hollywood's copyright concerns, there is no digital output for video).

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Feel

How speedily the machine responds to disc transport commands (play, scan, etc.) will directly affect the quality of your videophile life. If you're not comfortable with its speed, rhythm and control structure, your audiovisual party-head may suffer. And if its interface makes you work too hard to select and maintain preferred settings, the first flush of enthusiasm may give way to annoyance and disillusion.

The remote must fit your hand, differentiating transport controls by size and shape and placing these and other commonly used functions where your fingers expect to find them. A jog/shuttle can be helpful at the deck and, especially, at the remote, where you'll use it more often. A motorized swing-down front panel can add a touch of showmanship. All these things are subjective in value — you may like them a lot or you may not care at all for them.

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The future

DTV/HDTV may some day pose a threat to the current incarnation of DVD, but that day will likely be a long time coming. While DTV will probably grow slowly, DVD will most likely continue growing at a healthy pace, especially now that it has the support of all the major Hollywood studios.

Ultimately, DVD and HDTV will combine, thanks to the higher-bandwidth blue laser, but not until Hollywood is satisfied that copy-protection technology has made it impossible to make illegal copies of master-quality video material. The next generation of DVD players from format co-inventor Toshiba will include a NUON chip that adds interactive capabilities, including Web browsing and games.

Coming soon are DVD-Audio players and, hopefully, discs. These will add surround capability using the Meridian lossless encoding (MLP) technique. Like formats as such Dolby Digital and dts, MLP enables fat digital data to travel through somewhat thinner transmission media (including but not limited to DVD). Unlike these formats, which discard supposedly inaudible data, MLP reconstructs the entire digital signal.

DVD-Audio has a rival called SACD. Rumor has it that combination players handling both formats (plus DVD-Video and CD) are on the drawing boards for introduction in the near future.

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From information provided by etown.com.

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