Denon 2930 - First Hands-on Impressions
I am the owner of a Denon 2910 (which feeds a 65” Mitsubishi 1080p DLP set via HDMI) who has just bought a 2930. Overall, I have been very impressed with the previous combination - nonetheless, I am exploring upgrading to a 2930 or 3930 for two reasons.
First - On 90% of WELL MASTERED DVDs that are taken from GOOD SOURCES, my current combination looks superb - easily rivaling the HDTV channels I get from Comcast (as they are so highly compressed - Discovery HD being the notable exception).
HOWEVER, even the best disks all seem to exhibit some macro-blocking. You see it, for example, on any of the Star Wars disks in scenes that are dominated by black star-fields. Bugs the heck out of me. The Realta implementation in the 5910 has apparently entirely eradicated this. That alone would be enough to make the switch.
Secondly - like many newer displays, my new Mitsubishi is 1080P native - and the most the 2910 can spit out is 1080i. So I have my choice of handing off 720p and letting the sets inferior scalers kick in (I do notice a slight loss of resolution and apparent sharpness vs. the 1080i feed) OR I can give it 1080i and let the sets inferior de-interlacer kick in (I then notice some motion artifacts). It would clearly be ideal to have a single deinterlacing and a single scaling process - as opposed to multiple processes - and to do it on the best platform.
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Yesterday (August 9) I my 2930 finally arrived. I brought it home with high expectations and walked away a bit disappointed.
Physically, the thing is impressive. It weights 17lbs, vs 12lbs for the 2910. It is also 2.5" deeper, (15.25", not accounting for room for cable protrusion) - which may be challenging in some shallower racks.
For initial testing, I used clips from about two dozen different films - old, new, anamorphic, non-anamorphic, well sourced and mastered, not so well mastered and/or sourced. Etc.
Usability in a couple key areas is improved. For example, the tediously slow responsiveness of the 2910 and 3910 to user commands (pulling up the menu, switching chapters, etc) is greatly improved - you no longer feel like you are waiting forever.
The unit also adds an "auto" option to it's Squeeze Mode - something formerly only available on the $3,500 5910. Most widescreens fed progressive signals automatically "stretch" them to fill the 16x9 screen whether they are anamorphically recorded or not. With the previous players, you had to manually toggle this (nestled several menu items down). The 2910, in auto, seems to detect and toggle this for you, flawlessly (ran a whole batch of film clips through).
Lastly on "usability," I found some problem DVDs that my old 2910 would hang on (disks were totally clean -apparently mastering issues) which now present no problem to the player.
Having said all that, the PRIMARY reason I would consider dropping nearly $1k on a SD DVD player is video quality. That's where, at least based on my first 6 hours with this thing, I walked away disappointed.
Macroblocking (MB) does indeed appear to be gone. HOWEVER, in the same difficult scenes where macro-blocking usually occurs (darker, slight shade gradation), you now have what I would call "micro-blocking" (mB). This amounts to a far larger number of now much smaller but still randomly shimmering and moving blocks. In many scenes, this IS far less visible and distracting than the MB. The "Star Wars III" beginning (scrolling words followed by only a starfield) is a good example of this. The scene in "Firewall" where Jack "Harrison Ford" retreats to the closet when Bill shoots Harry was really annoying with MB all over the dark closet and the yellowish outside of the closet door. It is way improved on the 2930, with mB shimmering in the closet dark areas, and virtually no artifacts on the yellow exterior.
On the other hand, there are other scenes which never had notable MB that now show mB - often significantly. The scene in "Last Samurai" in which Tom Cruise's character enters a room to look at Taka's dead husband's red Samurai warrior "suit" is a good example. Cruise is wearing black and his outfit, as he enters the room, is just crawling (notably) with these mB artifacts. There are virtually no MB artifacts in the 2910. In "Lord of the Rings III" - an average master given how much they had to compress it to fit it on a single dual layer disk - many of the darker scenes are now crawling with these mB artifacts. While MB was present in most of these earlier, this looks MUCH nosier.
To rid yourself of this effect, you have to kick the MPEG NR filter on (fairly high) which results in an absolutely awful (soft, smeared) picture.
Overall, in terms of MB vs mB - the 2930 still seems to be a clear improvement. But not without tradeoffs.
Now, beyond MB....my first impression is that this is a step backwards in terms of visual quality. I noticed no improvement in sharpness regardless of how I tweaked or turned off the various enhancement and sharpness settings. In many cases, I noticed what seemed to be a softer picture - blurring and loss of detail. This was particularly noticeable in the hair in midrange to close-up shots of heads: "STW III" - beginning of Chapter 26, the princess's hair looks to be more of a brownish blob than anything else; The "Mask of Zoro" (Superbit edition), near the beginning of Chapter 7, Zeta Jones' hair; "Firewall" - LOTS of different shots of Harrison Ford's head; "Flight Plan", Chapter 2 - the little girl's hair.
The other feature of these new Denon decks I was interested in was their 1080p output as my display converts everything to 1080p (and accepts 1080p inputs). I had noticed greater sharpness (vs a 720p feed) but occasional motion artifacts when feeding a 1080i signal to my display. This was primarily in very smooth pans or shots of very smoothly moving objects - the motion would then exhibit a slight "jerkiness." This jerkiness was indeed gone with a 1080p feed, but no other visual benefit of the 1080p (over the 1080i) was apparent. I should say that this "artifact" is not evident in many scenes as you really do need very smooth movement. And even then, you have to be looking for it a little bit.
So, based on this first impression, it seems that, in replacing the Faroudja solution with the new Silicon Optics chip, Denon has largely tackled the MB issue but taken a step backwards in the sharpness of the picture without any other notable improvements.
This could be simply a result of un-refined firmware (my deck indicates a May '06 build date) which might be fixable; could be the result of a poor implementation of the HQV algorithms in the new Reon chip; or perhaps even the scaler. I don't know what Denon used for scaling in anything but the 5910 (where it is a highly regarded DVDO chipset). Faroudja provided scaling on it's chipsets, Silicon Optics also does on the Realta, but apparently not on the Reon (at least it is not advertised).
Other than that, this deck does put out a true 1080p feed which, for those few displays that are 1080p AND accept native input, may provide a slight benefit in motion fluidity.
CONCLUSION thus far: the usability enhancements are nice but are primarily convenience issues. I care a lot about video quality and the deck is, on first impressions, a mixed bag. MB is definitely improved (but not without some tradeoffs), 1080p works but with minor advantage, detail IN SOME SCENES FROM SOME FILMS appears markedly worse while not appearing noticeably better on any material. On the most superbly mastered disks from the best source material ("SW III" and the Superbit of "Spider Man 2", for example) this is not the case. But on lesser and yet still decent material (the majority of what is out there) like "Flight Plan," "Firewall" and many others - this comes across as a net loss in picture quality to me.
These are only first impressions. My display has two HDMI inputs, so this weekend I will set it up to be able to do true A/B switching between the 2910 and 2930 to compare. My display is already calibrated but I will play more with the deck settings.
If, in the end, the picture quality appears to be a tossup, I may keep the new deck for usability. If, however, my impression remains that of a net loss in picture quality, this deck is going back.
hans.roehrig@us.fujitsu.com
