DVD Player Brands

DVD players will stay safely relevant for a few more years

One thing is certain about the advancement of technology: its cycles are faster with every generation. Its hard to believe as recently as 1997 talk of DVDs was limited to techie geeks as a curiosity spoken of in the same breath as a manned mission to Mars. But in 99 they were the next big thing, by 2001 just about everybody had a player and a copy of the Matrix on DVD, and we hailed a brave new world of entertainment. Compare this to the time it took to adopt the CD or VCR, and one can see the pattern is one of ever faster adoption, which could mean an even faster demise.

Some might point out that the days of any new technology are numbered as soon as its born. This point was driven home for DVD at CES in January 2005 when big electronics manufacturers demonstrated their respective offerings in Blu-Ray and HD DVD. They promised release dates as early as Q4 that very year. Despite delays to the rollout of PC based Blu-Ray components, once skirmishes with HD DVD are sorted out the new technologies will bring about a quick end to the life of DVD.

Dont expect DVD to linger on shelves as long as video tapes. If common sense prevails in deploying this technology it should be affordable, rewritable and universally compatible right out of the gate. But dont expect common sense to prevail when the avarice of a multi-billion dollar market is at stake.

This means your DVD player is safe, at least for the next year or two, which is the foreseeable future in tech-years. The humble DVD has a few things working against it now, not the least of which are the new technologies that even now cannibalize their market potential to name DVDs successor.

The main problem with DVD is that it cant present a high definition picture to your HDTV. This was fine when the first HDTV hit the market and all the average consumer had to compare was how the same DVD looked on an older NTSC television. But now the local cable company has surpassed your trusty progressive scan DVD player, you can rent Pay-Per-View movies in beautiful 720P that make your HD display positively sing. Suddenly your DVD collection looks a little dated.


Upscaling DVD Players

This brings us to why we still might consider investing in a DVD player at the twilight of its life cycle. If youre looking at DVD players, interested in buying a new one, youve found the right place. There will be many recommendations made in this DVD player section.

Obviously youve given some thought to how much you really want to spend on a new DVD player. Fortunately the DVD player manufacturers know its lifecycle is waning and consequently theyre cheaper than ever before. By all means you should go out there and grab any manufacturers better quality DVD player for affordable prices. Youll get no justification for a $30 Wall-Mart special here. Garbage is still garbage at any stage in the technologies life.

Beware of the new high definition upscaling DVD players. It seems some manufacturers are so eager to fill a void that they now call any DVD player with an HDMI output an HDTV compatible DVD Player. Beware of buying one under false pretenses: there are no high definition DVD players yet. Those upsampling or upscaling DVD players have an internal scaler built in to match your televisions resolution with its digital output. This isnt a bad thing, but its not HD. There is no information added to the images. Its attempting a sharper image, but it wont look any better unless your TV had a bad build-in scaler. Your TV has a native resolution and already scales any other resolution to its native using its built-in scaler. Which do you think has a better scaler; a $3,000 TV or a $150 DVD player?

If you look around at DVD players youll see upscaling DVD players start at just over $100 for a cheapie. You stop seeing upscaling features after about $200. The really expensive DVD players around $300 or higher generally dont bother with this feature. This is because they dont need it. The image of your DVD player is only as good as the video DACs it uses.

A DAC is a digital to analogue converter, a chip in every DVD player that reads the information on the DVD and transforms it into a picture your TV can display. Thats the Achilles heel of any DVD players image quality. A cheap DAC makes poor pictures, a very good quality DAC makes as nice a picture it can from the source material it is provided. These days the cost of very good DACs has come down considerably. So todays $200 DVD players by Pioneer and Yamaha and even Cambridge Audio are yesterdays $500 DVD players.

If youre looking for a new DVD player, take heart: theyre going to be with us awhile so get comfortable with your 480P images. If youre the impatient sort with your technology you can join the techies with Windows WMV HD movie files on a Windows Media Center HTPC. This is a budding technology that doesnt care about optical hardware. It nips the heels of todays big electronics firms and their pretensions that the future of media belongs to yet another generation of discs bought at stores.

If the brain-trust behind HD DVD or Blu-Ray doesnt get its act together soon, high def media files, traded on the internet and played back on HDTVs through computers will take over, and the next generation optical storage will be relegated to a backup medium only.