HD Upconversion DVD Player

It was about time to part with my Kenwood DV-605 5 disc DVD changer. It could not play any of the formats like DVD+R/RW or DVD-R/RW. Some of the DVD+R movies that I made, it was able to load but was stuck at the Title Menu and would not proceed.

After my recently found interest in converting home movies from analog to digital format, I thought it was about time to investigate in a new DVD player which could support all formats. In the quest, I found about some DVD players which can upconvert regular 480i and 480p signals to high-defintion 720p and 1080i signals.

Requirements:

1. Be able to play all the formats (DVD-A, SACD, and DivX will be added benefit.)
2. Be able to convert Standard Defintion or SD (480i) Enhanced Defintion or ED (480p) signals to High Defintion or HD (720p and 1080i). Confused about all these singals? I will write about them in detail in my next post.

And googling revealed there are three good contesters for this category.

• LG LDA-511 (Same as LG DVB418)
• Panasonic S97S
• Samsung DVD-HD850

(I am not mentioning prices as they might change by the time you read these).

I went and bought LG DVB418 from Bestbuy. Hooked it up to my receiver and HDTV, The picture quality is awesome, sound is good. It plays all of my backup DVDs on DVD-R and DVD+R, I haven’t tried a DivX and MPG4 disk yet. And in attempt to upconver the signal here is what I learned.

My HDTV does not support 720p but 1080i only. I bought my 36″ Panasonic HDTV (CRT) in 2003, so this is one of the drawbacks of adopting to new technologies too soon. Second, its not a widescreen TV.

The first problem of having ability to play only 1080i is not actually a problem. But when I upconvert the signal to 1080i it becomes 16:9 format signal or wide screen image. Which does not look good on my letterbox HDTV.

And, the LD DVD player upconverts signal only on non-copy protected movies over the component ouput, on HDMI output however it does not have any problems. And yet again, my HDTV (being 3 years old) does not have HDMI input.

So much said, now I am reconsidering whether I need an upconverting DVD player or wait till I buy a wide screen plasma TV

Update:
Finally bought the LG DVD player. Its awsome, hackable to support all region DVDs. Upconverts regular DVD to high definiton and has crisp picture quality. And yes, you just burn your DivX files to a DVD/CD as a regular file, no need to convert them as DVD-MPEG, put the disk in the player shows you the directory listing. Select the file and bang…now you can fit 4 movies in one DVD