Pioneer DV-490V Upscaling DVD Player

Intro

The DV-490V is the latest affordable HD-upscaling DVD player from the optical video disc veterans at Pioneer. At about £130, it's by far less expensive than the top-of-the-line DV-989AVi (which is at the very least five times the price). From the "Dual PureCinema Progressive Scan" text on the front, wishful thinkers would hope that this deck uses the proprietary Pioneer deinterlacing/scaling technology found in the said top-of-the-line models. Sadly, this just isn't possible at this price point and the similarity is in name only, as this cheaper player uses a more run-of-the-mill deinterlacing and scaling solution from Mediatek Taiwan for its picture enhancing work.

It surprises a lot of people that a Pioneer player doesn't contain many (if any) Pioneer chips inside it, but this is typical of cheaper players from almost every manufacturer. Only the highest-end machines tend to contain proprietary parts.

A similar player, which adds DVD-Audio and SACD support, is also available - the DV-696AV. The price for this extra feature is an additional £30 on top of this player's £130 tag. Since I don't have any DVD-Audio or SACD discs, this review concerns itself with the DV-490V.


As it's an upscaling player, via the HDMI output it can take your current DVDs and attempt to fake a High Definition picture out of them (provided you have an HDTV, of course). On top of this, it plays JPEG, MP3, WMA and even DivX files burned to disc. It also features the usual video output options alongside the digital HDMI terminal: Component Progressive Scan, Composite Video, and RGB via the SCART socket. Interestingly, this player has no S-Video output capability whatsoever (it can't send the signal over the SCART terminal either) - but that's not a big deal because in Europe, where people with older TVs can use higher quality RGB, S-Video is close to insignificant.


Superficially, the player comes in either a silver or black finish and is nice and thin. Because of supply issues at Pioneer UK, I had a silver player for reviewing but I'd really have liked one in black to match my black HDTV. It's a lot less deep than most other players I've seen, meaning it could be pushed up close to the wall. On top of this, it's really light as well.

Remote control

At first, this looks like the exact same "non expensive" remote control Pioneer have been using for a good while with their cheaper players. And there's nothing wrong with that at all, because it works perfectly. It's actually a lot nicer than the remote that ships with the top-of-the-range players, which feature an annoying thumb-chafing joystick instead of nice, simple directional buttons. Whether or not it's down to manufacturing differences or there's been some sort of redesign I'm not sure, but this remote has nice, easily squishable buttons that depress easily. It has a Power button, and Open/Close button (a very welcome addition because my other DVD player has this only on the front of the unit), as well as buttons for "Home Menu", Zoom, Display, and Audio, Subtitle, Angle, and the usual others. It fits nicely into your hand and is just the right size. Nice job, Pioneer.

What's also great is that the player has a directional pad, Menu, Home Menu, and Enter buttons mounted on its front. This made reviewing it a lot eaiser and is a fantastic idea. I'd imagine store owners will find this particularly useful.

Picture Tweaks

So, what sort of picture options do we have to get the best out of this player? The DV-490V offers the important adjustments and offers none of the unimportant Noise Reduction or MPEG block noise reduction features that sometimes appear. Why are these insignificant? Because they normally do more harm than good and most TVs now offer these adjustments anyway.

Pressing the HOME MENU button on the remote or on the front of the player brings up the familiar Pioneer main menu.


Although Video Adjust is what we're mainly concerned with, the "Initial Settings" menu is home to the HDMI Output options. The options here let you choose 1080i upscaled video, 720p upscaled video, 480p/576p Deinterlaced, non-scaled video, or 480i/576i interlaced, standard-def video straight off the MPEG decoder with minimal additional processing. Yes, this players' HDMI output can send 480i and 576i, which is unusual and a welcome addition for people that want to use an external video processor to do the necessary work. (Note that the resolution option in the player's menu changes to reflect the last disc you had in - 480 for NTSC, 576 for PAL.)


You can also choose the HDMI Colour setting - RGB, Full range RGB, or Component, just in case your display favours one over the other. On my TV, these options made little to no difference. Although 1080i video looked good - far, far better than the pixellated look of my older Panasonic DVD-S97, in fact - I went with 720p in the end.

Now we've chosen an output resolution, it's time to look through the Video Adjust menu. I don't feel many of the options here need significant explanation because most of them are the same as the options you're familiar with on your TV. (Chroma Level, to my eyes, is simply a saturation/colour adjustment). Interestingly, setting "Gamma" to High will make the picture Darker, with off being the lightest setting. My older player, and TV, work the other way around - which is technically correct, I'm not sure.

In these menus, you can also toggle the Component output between Interlaced and Progressive modes, as well as changing between Composite Video (default) or RGB output via the SCART terminal. (As an added bonus, the DV-490V does output video over HDMI as well as Progressive via Component at the same time. If you have a setup that requires, for example, a projector to be fed via Component and a TV to be fed via HDMI, this would be very useful.)


Sharpness is probably the most important option here. It works very differently on the analogue outputs (including Component video) compared to how it works on the HDMI output, so take heed. There is very little difference between the settings on HDMI; "Standard" and "Soft" seemed to act like very, very subtle filters with Fine giving what to me looked like the most detail. That said, it's possible there could actually be no difference at all and the subtle jump in the picture after adjusting the setting was fooling me.

On Component Video and RGB over SCART, Standard was the best setting because Fine was significantly edge enhanced (helped along a little by a bug in my TV) and Soft had excessive horziontal blurring.

My previous Panasonic S97 gave control of numerical values for all of the video controls (including Sharpness). I found this VERY useful for connecting to my TV, which sadly adds a bit of edge enhancement to Standard Definition video. It meant that I could sidestep the TV's problem and get a nice, natural picture over Component. I'd really appreciate more control for the Sharpness here instead of just 3 pre-defined settings.

I should point out that when testing the RGB SCART output, the video began to roll and lose sync when playing NTSC discs. This appears to have been a one-off glitch, because setting the SCART output to "Video" then back to "RGB" fixed it.

Picture Quality

Note that while reviewing the picture quality, I'm going to use animated DVDs almost exclusively. This is for two reasons: first, I have a lot of them, and second, animation is a sure-fire way of showing up the best and worst aspects of a DVD player or display device. I honestly think if the people putting these things together demoed animation more, they'd catch colour shift problems, chroma errors, and bad motion a lot easier.

Video playback: NTSC Film

Via HDMI, I tried some DVDs of films from the USA first of all. I'm very pleased to report that this player produces absolutely brilliant pictures. They were free of the macro-blocking enhancement associated with my previous DVD player, free of the chroma upsampling error seen on some higher-end Pioneer players, and showed no motion issues.

On the DV-490V, I couldn't find any fault that was specific to NTSC film material. However, this player does not pass blacker-than-black video on any video standard (more on that later).

NTSC DVDs that were previously macro-blocking extravaganzas on my old player played with remarkable clarity on the DV-490V. Sequences of Disney's new all-digital transfer of "Pocahontas" show very strong, flat colours - mostly deep reds and blues - and I was delighted when I saw that none of the macroblocking or ringing around the colours was present. For instance, a scene that shows a blue sky and a darker blue tree branch was problematic for my last player - the darker tree branch became harder to differentiate from the background. On this new Pioneer, it's as clear as you could expect from a format that uses compressed colours.

Notice how in this example - from the NTSC version of Futurama Volume 1 (which although being a TV show, is authored at the same frame rate as a Film and in mostly Progressive Format, so is still worthy of being included in this section), the Faroudja-based Panasonic player shows the side of the red jacket having a slight shadow because the black outline is bleeding into it. Notice also how the black outlines in the middle of the red area are becoming less distinct because of the bleed. Compare this to the image from this Pioneer player - the colours are by far clearer. Colour clarity does a lot for convincing your eyes that they're seeing a properly defined image and can give the illusion of more detail.



Update (June 16, 2006): After this review was first published, it was brought to my attention via the AV Forums that earlier Pioneer budget players have failed to pass "blacker than black" video - that is, they displayed certain very dark shades as one colour rather than as subtle gradiations. Sadly, it seems that this player is the same. Via HDMI, the THX test pattern's drop shadow was never clearly defined as it was on my older Panasonic player, and via Component, it never appeared at all.

Video playback: NTSC Interlaced TV shows

Next up, I used my favourite weapon of choice: the DVD of the Ren & Stimpy Show (which seems to have had a lot of exposure around DVD Times!). Ren & Stimpy was a cartoon that was (in older episodes) printed to film and then telecined for video editing and broadcast. These interlaced broadcast tapes were used as a source for the DVD. This means that this show is great for sniffing out the Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE) which was present on the last high-end Pioneer player I owned (the DV-668AV). The CUE error simply shows itself as jagged edges around colours and is extremely distracting on any animated content. As with the film performance, there is none of that to be found on this cheaper player (pretty sick in a way, isn't it?)

Motion was handled very well, however some aliasing was evident, as you'd expect from Interlaced video. I began to miss the DCDi smoothing technology present on the Faroudja's chipsets. This isn't a huge deal, however - I can accept this from a budget player.

Next up, I tried some demo material that most people would find confusing - a badly drawn (yet funny) animated show called "Home Movies" that was animated in Macromedia Flash and then output to some sort of tape, then to DVD. By "badly drawn", I mean that this show contains a lot of areas of totally solid colour with little detail. I was really glad to see that the colours were clean, clear, and had none of the slight ringing that was visible on my old Faroudja-based player. If I sat back just a little, it honestly did look at times like I was watching the original Flash movie files, rather than MPEG-2 compressed DVD versions. Not only this, but there was again also less colour bleed than on my older Panasonic machine. This could be because the S97 relies on a Chroma filter to blur out any trace of the Chroma Upsampling Error, whereas this player is 100% free of it from the start.

Video playback: NTSC Interlaced movies

Some DVDs - usually from niche suppliers - are authored interlaced rather than with a Progressive Film flag. This means that it's harder for the player to know where to look to extract the original film frames, and means that the Deinterlacing hardware has to do the job without being given any clear hints. An example of this is the R1 version of "The Card Player". I'm assuming that the DVD authoring crew were handed an interlaced master tape and decided that rather than trying to de-interleave it themselves, they should author the disc interlaced and let the user's player, or display, do the necessary work.

So, how does the Pioneer DV-490V hold up with material like this? It does a job that's average but certainly acceptable at the price point. The results are not unwatchable but on this player it's easy to tell discs that have Progressive flags apart from ones that don't because of the slight jittering to motion. Notice how in the video below, the slight telecine wobble on the video transfer confuses the deinterlacing circuit and causes fine details to flicker. (The strange pattern on the picture is the result of recording an LCD TV with a camera, not a fault with the DVD player).



I don't see this as a big deal personally because discs authored this way are in the minority - the fault here is more with the disc not using DVD to its full potential, rather than the player.

Video playback: NTSC video (60i)

"Jackass: The Movie", filmed on camcorders (like the TV show), is presented on DVD interlaced (60i). The player handles it exceptionally well. Every detail of Johnny Knoxville's giggling face was reproduced on the Pioneer with minimal combing.

So far, so good. With the exception of the fact that the player does not pass blacker than black video (on any type of DVD), NTSC material is otherwise handled well with only shoddily produced discs displaying bearable problems. By far more relevant to most people in Europe however, is how the player plays PAL movies. Read on.

Video playback: PAL movies

Sadly, this is where things begin to really fall apart. Playing PAL movies on this player reveals what I believe is commonly termed as a Picture Shift problem: the bottom few lines of the picture are misplaced at the top of the screen (almost like when you go to see a film at the cinema where the projectionist hasn't framed the image properly). My LCD TV (a Sony BRAVIA KDL-32V2000) has an option to add more overscan and sidestep this problem, but I believe this is the only LCD TV on the market that allows for this adjustment. If the glitch is visible on other displays, it's going to annoy quite a few people.



What's by far more serious though, is that only ONE of the PAL discs I tried - the UK release of "Howl's Moving Castle" - was free of combing artefacts on movement (particularly noticeable on camera pans). Live action PAL content such as "Thirteen" and "Alias" both showed this problem, although it stuck out like a sore thumb on animated movies such as the UK releases of "The Incredibles" and "Monsters Inc.", the Australian PAL version of Disney's "Mulan", and the Danish PAL version of "The Nightmare Before Christmas", which contained some very grizzly panning shots. It seems that the video chip in this player isn't capable of properly engaging a 2:2 Pulldown Detection mode to extract the proper film frames from PAL DVDs.

Although this is partly excused by the machine's price, I was honestly left asking, "what's the point?" - the reason for Progressive Scan DVD players existing is to avoid motion issues like this and to present natural, film-like frames. Here's a small Flash demonstration of this problem: look at how the flames in front of the man's face cause his features to jitter and lose detail. Pay special attention to the jagged look his eyes now have.



Next up with "The Incredibles", some issues were created by the player. All too often, action too close to the letterbox bars at the top and bottom of the screen (it's a 2.35:1 ratio film) showed little squares that jitter up and down over them - that is, parts of the picture changed into blocks and shifted a few pixels higher than the rest of the bars. This proved to be a little distracting.

Seeing as Pioneer advertises this DVD player as having "Dual PureCinema Progressive Scan" for "PAL/NTSC", I was expecting something a little better than this and was left fairly disappointed.

Video playback: PAL video (50i)

Content from a PAL video camera - like the Documentaries and Deleted Scenes on the "Peep Show: Series Two" DVD - is handled surprisingly well. It's obviously harder to tell with live action, but combing artefacts seem to be at a minimum here.

Responsiveness

Although this player takes a full 10 seconds to start, responsiveness from there on in is very good indeed. Fast forwarding is extremely fast, which is very nice to see in this price range. It's even faster than the high-end Pioneer I owned a few years ago. Rewinding is only a little slower.

Layer Change Speed

Sadly, like seemingly everything else with this player, all good things have to come to an end. The layer change, while not particularly lengthy (it lasts for about a second and drops to half-resolution video, like most players), unfortunately has an audio glitch. The sound drops out for about 1.5 seconds at the start of the second layer.

At first I assumed that this was an HDMI handshaking issue, and that the copy protection needed a slight delay to re-authenticate - but my assumption turned out to be wrong when I tried the same disc on my Panasonic S97. The layer change time was the same, but the audio remained on throughout. Not only this, but the DV-490V showed the same problem over the analogue audio outputs as well meaning the problem lies with the player and not with my TV's handling of any audio/video standard.

Sound

This player offers several "Audio DRC" and equaliser settings, none of which I feel are particularly important. It also has a digital coaxial output for connection to an amp/receiver. I couldn't find any issues at all with the sound other than the layer change issue.

The player also features DTS Digital Out.

Other conveniences

I was pleased to see that stopping the DVD and then starting it again would automatically resume playback from the exact position it was stopped at (and like everything else on this player, the speed at which this was done so was impressive). This is a very welcome feature especially since my Panasonic player requires me to manually place a "Position Memory" marker for the same effect.

The "Last Memory" feature also kicked in after playing another disc and then going back to the one I'd previously stopped, which I'd expect.

DivX Video Playback

This player plays DivX video files, like the kind you, erm, can download from the web.

I saw no problems with the DivX playback, although the disc I tried (containing a 600mb DivX file) did take a few seconds to load up. Hilariously, despite the test clip having a PAL (25fps) frame rate, it didn't have the motion issues that actual PAL DVDs showed, although the HDMI picture shift issue was still present.

Unsurprisingly, the DV-490V wouldn't play any HD DivX content.

Conclusion

The Pioneer DV-490V comes across as a frustratingly half-baked player. If we lived in an NTSC-only country, this would be a good upscaling DVD player with great speed and only a few issues, all of which could probably be justified by the cheap price.

The reality however, is that the average European consumer will have a collection that consists mainly of PAL DVDs with perhaps the occasional NTSC one. In this regard, the DV-490V is unacceptable and should not have been released to a European market with the "Dual PureCinema Progressive" branding intact.

I bought the DV-490V as a replacement for a Faroudja-based Panasonic DVD-S97, wanting to escape the Faroudja chipset's macroblocking issues and enjoy my animated films without flickering compression blocks. Sadly, the deinterlacing of PAL material on this Mediatek-based player is by far the greater of the two evils and I'm lucky that I bought the player from a store with such a great returns policy.

As I said, it's frustrating - it honestly does feel like Pioneer have taken a good NTSC player and haven't managed to get it ready for a PAL audience. Keep in mind that when I talk about my disappointment with PAL DVDs, this is coming from someone who's collection is 90% NTSC! I can't imagine how disappointing this player would be for PAL-only people. Videophiles, in addition, won't be happy that the player can't pass "blacker-than-black" shades.

That said, now that I've seen how clear pictures from non-Faroudja based players like this one can be, I'm determined to find a player that can handle both PAL and NTSC properly. It's just a pity that this isn't it.