Picture perfect, the Denon-DVD 2800 (Denon DVD 2800)

Member Name: gavcooper

Product:	Denon DVD 2800
Date:	26/02/02 (966 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great picture and sound quality, Champagne gold finish looks nice, Good build quality

Disadvantages: MP3 feature not as good as it should be, Not cheap

Background Information

I had been looking for a DVD player for quite a while, but I wanted the full DVD experience. Not just the great picture quality but the full Dolby 5.1 surround sound. I had also decided to replace my HI-FI system, I did not have the space for both so a Home Theatre System was the answer.


Buying a home theatre system

I started by looking in the major electrical stores, where I found some nice Sony and Panasonic systems. These systems sounded ok and the picture quality was good, but the small speakers struggled sometimes and the playback of CD's did not sound very good at all. I was going to need a Home Theatre System with a bit more power so I decided to spend a little more cash, after all a good HI-FI system would cost around £800.

Next stop was a specialist Home Entertainment shop, the trouble with these shops is you get carried away before you know it you are looking at a Home Theatre System that?s costing way above your price range. So I set myself a budget and asked the sales assistant for advise on the best equipment I could get for my money. I was shown a Denon Home Theatre set-up, the DVD-2800 being part of it. The full set-up was the DVD player a Denon AVR-2802 Amp and a set of five Definitive Technology speakers which they set it up I their demonstration room so I could see and hear them in action.


The DVD-2800 player

It had just been released and looked very smart in the champagne gold finish. The main difference from the older model was the Pro-Logic 2 feature which enables the speakers behind you to produce stereo sound effects. Pro-Logic 1 could only produce mono sound effects.

It's a big unit about double the height of most DVD players, but the simply clean styling makes a nice change from some button crazy DVD players. Just by looking at the DVD player you could see the build quality, and as with most of Denon's range it was available in
the standard black finish and a champagne gold finish which I had to have. The remote control is simple and well layed out, and does everything you need without the need to get up. The instruction manual is large, but only a quarter is needed and its easy to follow with clear diagrams.

The main features of the player are:

Silicon Image Pure Progressive: a high precision progressive scan circuit allows the reproduction of DVD's with a quality near that of the original.

54MHz 12-bit video D/A converter: with progressive images, oversampling of brightness and colour signals, to achieve images with all the beauty DVD's are meant to provide.

96kHz 24-bit D/A converter: this further enhances such aspects of audio performance.

CD-R/RW playback

Dolby Digital, Pro-Logic 2 and DTS

As well as playing DVD's you can play Audio CD's, VCD's and MP3's.

DVD's are faultless in their playback, great picture and sound quality. Audio CD's sound excellent and VCD's playback as well as VCR tapes.

The MP3 playback feature is something I have not seen on other DVD players. You just record well over 100 MP3's onto a blank CD-R or CD-RW in a ISO9660 format. When you insert a CD with MP3's on it, you are presented with a display on your TV to select the track you wish to play and that's it. However with the DVD player only able to recognise file names with eight characters or less and with no playlist feature available, its not as great as it first seems. Trying to fit some song titles into eight characters, is very difficult.


My verdict on DVD-2800

Its four months on after buying this DVD player I'm very happy with my purchase. Its not a cheap DVD player, but you get what you pay for and you are paying for real quality. I would defiantly recommend the DVD-2800 to someone looking for a mid range DVD player, but I think you would
need to go the full Home Theatre route to get the most out of it.

Summary: