Denon DVD-1930Thought I'd post a few comments about my new DVD player, the Denon DVD-1930. Although the 1930 has been available overseas for some time, it was only released in Australia a few weeks ago, so with any luck this post will draw some interested Aussie readers here.

The 1930 is an upscaling DVD player. That is, given a DVD with 480 or 576 lines of resolution, it can upscale the image all the way up to 1080 lines. Better still, it can output 1080p - a progressive-scan (non-interlaced, for you old-school computer-users) picture. Note that it can only upscale over HDMI, and you do it by clicking a button on the front panel of the player, which cycles through the various resolutions (720p, 1080i, 1080p). Because my TV has a native resolution of 1365x768, I opted to scale up to 720p.

The first movie we watched on the player was Fight Club, which was probably a bad example to begin with. Fight Club has a very dark, blotchy, scratchy picture, which was a deliberate design choice by Fincher and co, so it wasn't a great way of seeing how good the image could be on the player. It did, however, highlight something that concerned me greatly - the audio sync was terrible. The characters' lips were moving a fraction of a second after the dialog. Very off-putting.

After a few posts to Home Theatre Central, I learned that many upscaling players suffer from audio-sync issues (since the time it takes to upscale the image can leave the picture fractionally behind the sound). Fortunately, most players (including the 1930) come with a setting known as "audio delay". This allows you to tell the player how far away from the speakers you're sitting. If you're further away, it'll output the sound earlier so that by the time it reaches your ears it will be in sync with the video. The default, of course, is up around 3m.

The 1930's audio delay settings only appear to be for HDMI and Analog output (I'm using HDMI for video but optical digital for audio), but I set them all back to 0m distance anyway (meaning that the sound would be slightly delayed and thus in sync with the image). I also adjusted the delays on my old Sony receiver back to 0m.

The second movie we watched, Panic Room (is this a Fincher love-fest or what?) was outstanding. Audio sync was just fine, and the picture was very clear. There were concerns on the HTCentral forum about a problem known as "macro blocking", where dark parts of the picture appear to move and/or have purple splotches, and I may have noticed this effect, but it's really hard to tell.

The DVD-1930 is capable of playing DivX files directly off a data disc. We watch most of the DivX files that I download using Transcode360 - streaming the movies directly from my XP Media Center PC to the Xbox 360. However, the first episode of Heroes had been giving me (and others, according to the Transcode360 forum) grief - it simply wouldn't stream. So I burned the first two episodes to a CD (yes, a CD - we're only talking about two 350MB files here) and popped it into the 1930. They played without any problems. Very impressed.

The last movie we watched (this past weekend) was the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The picture quality in this flick, particularly in the earlier scenes in Hobbiton, simply blew me away. I don't recall ever seeing it so vividly and sharply. Clearly the upscaled image was doing my HDTV justice.

At $699, this isn't a cheap DVD player, but it's around "entry level" when it comes to high-end upscaling players. Like my previous player (also from Denon), it's quality stuff, and I can't recommend it highly enough.