Vipers
Prominent Member
This discussion is running in the Denon 2500 and 3800 so I thought it may be worth starting a new thread for people who maybe interested but are not following the Denon thread. These were my findings as reported in the Denon thread :-
Morning Guys,
Sitting here bleary eyed after getting to bed at 1am after the shootout and up again at 5am for work, the things we do for our love of AV
First of I'd like to say it was great to meet Ian and Phil, be gentle with the editing please phil, I'm sitting here now not so tired as last night thinking what I should have said instead of what came out. Also a big thanks to Tony and Steve at TLC for giving up their time and letting us loose with so many players, I don't think there are too many places were you could get this opportunity and like Ian mentioned, great hospitality.
So on with the shootout, I'd like to say that I went into this shootout as a consumer with no real technical knowledge, I judged my findings on quite simply what I was seeing, I'm in the market for a standalone player after retiring my PS3 afew months back once reports starting surfacing that it wasn't the pinnacle in picture quality. Basically the shoot out consisted of testing the 8 players with scenes 2 and 3 from I Robot, listening through the Pioneer Susano and viewing on a Pioneer KRP-600M ISF Calibrated, so in theory the differences we'd see would be due to the players solely.
I wrote loads of notes but I've left them at home so this is written from memory but we started of with the Bush and initially we were very impressed, considering this is only around £100 it's amazing value and probably what the Blu Ray market needs to help make it mass market, It produced really good fine detail but seemed to lack shadow detail and any real depth to the overall picture, This really showed up as we were viewing it on a 60" but if used on a smaller screen I think most people would be very impressed.
Next up was the Sony 350, With this we all found that the picture just seemed really soft, it just seemed to lack detail and a certain sharpness to the image that you'd expect from Blu Ray, we didn't have time to test Standard Def but it would have been interesting to see how my Oppo would have compared on the same scenes in SD. Again for the money it does a reasonable job and with the offers flying around at the moment its hard to not recommend to people who are not chasing the ultimate picture.
Now the infamous PS3, this I was really looking forward too, was it just average at Blu Ray has had been reported lately, well from what I saw I have to say yes, very much so. There is no denying as a one box hub, ie BD palyer, Games console, Media server etc its an amazing piece of kit, but last night we were looking solely at picture quality and from what I saw I was quite suprised, it really lacked the fine detail, to quite a shocking extent and compared to the Denons it really lacked any depth, it seemed to have no real dynamic range with shadow detail also suffering. Also on the PS3 we noticed a real difference on the audio side, I found that it lacked any real punch or depth, whether it was right or wrong I'm not qualified to say but it was definately different and I found it not as pleasing.
Next we tried the denon 1800, straight away it was plain to see that we were entering a totally different league, which you would hope when jumping up in price that much, there was excellent fine and shadow detail, real depth to the picture, smooth motion and it produced excellent sound, the 1800 is an excellent performer.
Then onto the 2500, at first we struggled to see much difference to the 1800 but after looking very hard you could see slightly more detail, whether at normal viewing distance this would be apparent I don't know but it was there and for me as I have a LX81 amp then the 2500 would be fine as I could bitstream straight to the amp, again another star performer.
Next up was the 3800, we were all looking forward to seeing this as at around £1500 it's a significant price hike to anything else we'd seen and personally I was interested to see if the Realta HQV processing would alter things significantly. As soon as the 20th Century Fox logo appeared it was obvious that there was a 3d effect we hadn't seen before and the audio again seemed a step up, which personally I don't understand as other than the PS3 all the players were bitstreaming to the Susano and letting the amp do the work, I'm sure someone who is more technical than me can describe why this was the case. Anyway the 3800 really did offer a superb picture, there was amazing depth and clarity to the image which we hadn't seen before, excellent fine detail retrieval and brilliant detail from the dark areas, on the cheaper players the shadows were blocks of black with no detail but when going up the price range you could see more and more detail becomming apparent which I guess all add to help create the pop to the image, whether this overall increase in picture and sound quality to the 2500 is worth twice the price each individual would have to decide after a demo but the differences are definately there.
Finally after hours of watching will Smith wake up we tried the Pioneer LX51 and 71, Basically we couldn't see any real difference between these 2 players which begs the question were does your extra money go on the 71, maybe it will be in the upscaling of SD, maybe the audio components are of a better quality, obviously you get more bling on the 71 with gold plated connectors and silver trim but on picture quality alone they look identical, so how did they compare to the Denons, Well I'm a bit of a Pioneer fan but I have to say I definately prefer the image the Denon produces, even on the 1800 which I guess is their nearest competitor, at first we thought the Pioneers were producing better shadow detail but when going onto view further scenes I noticed the image looked brighter, slightly bleeched as if the contrast had been whacked up, Phil explained to me that he thought the Gamma looked slightly out, either way there is definately a difference and I found the Denons produced a more natural looking picture, Saying that the Pioneers were still in a different class to the budget players in detail levels and again offered that 3d image that the budgets couldn't produce, also the Pioneers could quite match the punchy sound of the Denons, well the 3800 at least.
So to sum up I think it went as I thought it would, you do get what you pay for but that there now is a player for everyones budget which has got to be great for Blu Ray as a product. I think the biggest shock was just how good the Bush was as none of us expected much and personally just how bad the PS3 was at fine detail. For me I'll be checking out the Pioneer LX91 hopefully over the weeekend which I really want to be amazing as it will intergrate into my setup perfectly, but after last night it really has got a lot to prove to knock off the 3800 from the top of the Blu Ray hill.
Hope I haven't rambled on too long, thanks again to everyone involved last night for giving me the oppotunity to see for myself that not all Blu Ray players are the same, I don't know how they do it but there really is significant differences between all the players on both the picture and audio front, I guess the only way to know what is right for you is to audition the different players for yourself and make your own mind up, but at the moment a 3800 will be joining my setup.
Cheers.
Morning Guys,
Sitting here bleary eyed after getting to bed at 1am after the shootout and up again at 5am for work, the things we do for our love of AV
First of I'd like to say it was great to meet Ian and Phil, be gentle with the editing please phil, I'm sitting here now not so tired as last night thinking what I should have said instead of what came out. Also a big thanks to Tony and Steve at TLC for giving up their time and letting us loose with so many players, I don't think there are too many places were you could get this opportunity and like Ian mentioned, great hospitality.
So on with the shootout, I'd like to say that I went into this shootout as a consumer with no real technical knowledge, I judged my findings on quite simply what I was seeing, I'm in the market for a standalone player after retiring my PS3 afew months back once reports starting surfacing that it wasn't the pinnacle in picture quality. Basically the shoot out consisted of testing the 8 players with scenes 2 and 3 from I Robot, listening through the Pioneer Susano and viewing on a Pioneer KRP-600M ISF Calibrated, so in theory the differences we'd see would be due to the players solely.
I wrote loads of notes but I've left them at home so this is written from memory but we started of with the Bush and initially we were very impressed, considering this is only around £100 it's amazing value and probably what the Blu Ray market needs to help make it mass market, It produced really good fine detail but seemed to lack shadow detail and any real depth to the overall picture, This really showed up as we were viewing it on a 60" but if used on a smaller screen I think most people would be very impressed.
Next up was the Sony 350, With this we all found that the picture just seemed really soft, it just seemed to lack detail and a certain sharpness to the image that you'd expect from Blu Ray, we didn't have time to test Standard Def but it would have been interesting to see how my Oppo would have compared on the same scenes in SD. Again for the money it does a reasonable job and with the offers flying around at the moment its hard to not recommend to people who are not chasing the ultimate picture.
Now the infamous PS3, this I was really looking forward too, was it just average at Blu Ray has had been reported lately, well from what I saw I have to say yes, very much so. There is no denying as a one box hub, ie BD palyer, Games console, Media server etc its an amazing piece of kit, but last night we were looking solely at picture quality and from what I saw I was quite suprised, it really lacked the fine detail, to quite a shocking extent and compared to the Denons it really lacked any depth, it seemed to have no real dynamic range with shadow detail also suffering. Also on the PS3 we noticed a real difference on the audio side, I found that it lacked any real punch or depth, whether it was right or wrong I'm not qualified to say but it was definately different and I found it not as pleasing.
Next we tried the denon 1800, straight away it was plain to see that we were entering a totally different league, which you would hope when jumping up in price that much, there was excellent fine and shadow detail, real depth to the picture, smooth motion and it produced excellent sound, the 1800 is an excellent performer.
Then onto the 2500, at first we struggled to see much difference to the 1800 but after looking very hard you could see slightly more detail, whether at normal viewing distance this would be apparent I don't know but it was there and for me as I have a LX81 amp then the 2500 would be fine as I could bitstream straight to the amp, again another star performer.
Next up was the 3800, we were all looking forward to seeing this as at around £1500 it's a significant price hike to anything else we'd seen and personally I was interested to see if the Realta HQV processing would alter things significantly. As soon as the 20th Century Fox logo appeared it was obvious that there was a 3d effect we hadn't seen before and the audio again seemed a step up, which personally I don't understand as other than the PS3 all the players were bitstreaming to the Susano and letting the amp do the work, I'm sure someone who is more technical than me can describe why this was the case. Anyway the 3800 really did offer a superb picture, there was amazing depth and clarity to the image which we hadn't seen before, excellent fine detail retrieval and brilliant detail from the dark areas, on the cheaper players the shadows were blocks of black with no detail but when going up the price range you could see more and more detail becomming apparent which I guess all add to help create the pop to the image, whether this overall increase in picture and sound quality to the 2500 is worth twice the price each individual would have to decide after a demo but the differences are definately there.
Finally after hours of watching will Smith wake up we tried the Pioneer LX51 and 71, Basically we couldn't see any real difference between these 2 players which begs the question were does your extra money go on the 71, maybe it will be in the upscaling of SD, maybe the audio components are of a better quality, obviously you get more bling on the 71 with gold plated connectors and silver trim but on picture quality alone they look identical, so how did they compare to the Denons, Well I'm a bit of a Pioneer fan but I have to say I definately prefer the image the Denon produces, even on the 1800 which I guess is their nearest competitor, at first we thought the Pioneers were producing better shadow detail but when going onto view further scenes I noticed the image looked brighter, slightly bleeched as if the contrast had been whacked up, Phil explained to me that he thought the Gamma looked slightly out, either way there is definately a difference and I found the Denons produced a more natural looking picture, Saying that the Pioneers were still in a different class to the budget players in detail levels and again offered that 3d image that the budgets couldn't produce, also the Pioneers could quite match the punchy sound of the Denons, well the 3800 at least.
So to sum up I think it went as I thought it would, you do get what you pay for but that there now is a player for everyones budget which has got to be great for Blu Ray as a product. I think the biggest shock was just how good the Bush was as none of us expected much and personally just how bad the PS3 was at fine detail. For me I'll be checking out the Pioneer LX91 hopefully over the weeekend which I really want to be amazing as it will intergrate into my setup perfectly, but after last night it really has got a lot to prove to knock off the 3800 from the top of the Blu Ray hill.
Hope I haven't rambled on too long, thanks again to everyone involved last night for giving me the oppotunity to see for myself that not all Blu Ray players are the same, I don't know how they do it but there really is significant differences between all the players on both the picture and audio front, I guess the only way to know what is right for you is to audition the different players for yourself and make your own mind up, but at the moment a 3800 will be joining my setup.
Cheers.
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