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.
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