Any Sony 730 owners with PJs?

[Underscore]

I'm looking to get a Sony DVP-NS730 to provide a progressive output to drive my Z1 projector. From what I've read here and elsewhere it sounds excellent VFM, providing 930 video performance without the stuff that I don't need - SACD/onboard decoding. I'm just a little concerned that my expections of it might be a little high for a £125 player. Can any owners, or people who auditioned but didn't buy one, tell me whether this little player is as good as I've heard before I blow my hard-earned on it.

Tx,

_

 

[KraGorn]

I use a 730 to feed my Z2 and I'm perfectly happy with it .. whether that means it's a good player or my expectations are low is of course open to debate.

Progressive output is definitely far better than interlaced feeding the pj via component, and both NTSC and PAL seem to work equally well ... whilst it's not up to the pq from my Momitsu @ 720p via DVI it's not far off and IMHO it's well worth the money.

 

[gingerone]

I've just bought this player for use with my panasonic plasma and I think it's great.
I'm extremely picky about picture quality (ask my wife, she's nearly divorced me over my obsesion with picture quality!)
Well worth more than £125.

 

[Uzey]

I'm looking at this potentially great player too!!!
What's the cheapest multi-region price you can get it for?

 

[gingerone]

techtronics £124.99 delivered.

 

[KraGorn]

You may want to use Search the forums here for "techtronics" before ordering from them, though they often are the cheapest around.

 

[Underscore]

Well mine just arrived from techtronics. Yes, I know that they suck if anything goes wrong but my Pio 530 that I got from them played anything that I threw at it and they are cheap. If something goes wrong and I post on here about the hassle I'm having with them, feel free to rub it in!

Haven't got beyond plugging into the TV using composite and playing the start of a non-RCE R1 disc yet but I'll post my thoughts once I've had a bit of a chance to play with it.

_

 

[Underscore]

Well, I had a little time to play last night so I thought that I would post a few first impressions.

Now I can't comment too much on the absolute image quality since the progressive output is very dark; I whacked the brightness up on the PJ but I will reserve final judgement until I've adjusted the picture more carefully. However, first impressions are that the picture (with Standard picture settings and BNR of 1) is significantly softer looking (probably due to the Z1 scaler rather than the player itself) than a 1:1 mapped HTPC. All the same, it is very watchable.

The main thing that I wanted to test, though, was the deinterlacing performance, any ghosting issues and lip-sync performance. Firstly I put on R1 'Little Shop of Horrors' - a disc which showed significant lip-sync issue during the brief time that I had a 963SA - and the lip-sync (of the short clip that I watched) appeared fine.

I then slipped in my Mei-Ah version of 'Hard Boiled', a disc which is wrongly flagged. The 730 handled this perfectly - confirming what I guessed from a machine-translated spec; that this is a cadence-based rather than flag-reading deinterlacer.

I played a bit of R2 'Thelma & Louise' since this looks terrible if not deinterlaced properly. It looked great in 'Auto' mode.

Finally, I watched 'Scrat's missing adventure' from R2 'Ice Age' - which showed terrible ghosting with the Limit player that I tried from RS. With the 730, there was no trace of a ghost - indicating a well impedence-matched output stage.

So, in short, the progressive scan performance of this machine seems, from first impressions, to be very good indeed.

Another nice point is that ability to have it automatically select the soundtrack with the largest number of channels, with dts prioritised over DD. No more watching a disc with 5.1, only to realise after a minute or two that it has defaulted to the 2.0 soundtrack.

The only negative point that I've come across so far is that you can't use the component outputs if you select RGB on the SCART socket. Though this is hardly a big issue on a player that cost less than £125.

In summary, this player seems an utter bargain. I'm currently a very happy bunny.

_

 

[gingerone]

I agree with underscore. The picture did appear too dark at first but when I recalibrated my plasma using the dve disc I actually found that there is far more details than with my old player anyway. ( this is the only player I have seen that displays the drop down shadow on the thx optimiser!).
I love the player and for 125.00 it's a steal.

 

[Underscore]

OK, played some more last night and it's looking good. CG movies (e.g. Monsters Inc.) do look much less sharp than with the HTPC but put in a 'real' movie (e.g. Gladiator) and the difference, while still noticable, is much less marked. Ultimately, however, I'd be happy to watch the 730 in either case, so I guess the HTPC is likely to be relegated to doing PC-type things from now on.

One small problem, though, is that the NTSC picture was way over to the left. I went into my PJ service menu and adjusted with the THX optimode boxes screen; I was able to centre the image but could not reduce the overscan to the level that I would like - the dots in the leftmost and rightmost boxes were just on the screen. This doesn't bother me too much since I watch 95% PAL movies but does anyone know of a service mode for the 730 that would allow the NTSC output to be tweaked?

Tx,

_