The Pioneer Elite DV-79AVi DVD Player should really rank pretty high on your list if you are looking for something that is elite and plays everything, save for HD DVD and Blu-ray discs. It literally plays everything that you throw at it, via the newly installed 5″ consumer disc format. As an upconverting player, it plays DVD-Video discs from its HDMI output in 480i, 480p, 720p, or 1080i, but not 1080p. Only 480i and 480p are available in component. You will also discover that though upconversions of DVDs are sometimes advantageous, in reality it doesn’t increase the source resolution.
The unit delivers excellent sound from all audio formats, including DVD-Audio, SACD, and CD. You will be particularly impressed with the DVD-Video and CD performance, which to a large extent is helped by the D/A converter feature included within. While anything but cheap, the Pioneer DV-79AVi does offer superb sounding audio, as compared to many budget models, like the Pioneer DV-380, some of which do not even play audio CDs. The DV-79AVi’s video ouput is no less impressive and includes more than a dozen video adjustments including Chroma Delay and Gamma. You are further endowed with three different memory settings to carry out these adjustments.
The unit provides you with a control menu called ‘colour’ in the HDMI Initial Settings Menu, and offers you four choices. Three of them virtually provide identical images: RGB, Component, and Component (12-bit). Using these options you can manage the colour setting of the images so that they conform to your taste and genuinely replicate the natural hue of the characters. The fourth setting, the Full Range RGB, appears to use levels for passing computer video over DVI.
Tags for this article: 1080i, cd, hdmi, pioneer, upconversion
