Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Samsung DVDHD841

Samsung now has and HD-DVD player out that also supports both SACD and DVD-Audio! How cool is this! Retail is around $350

http://www.samsungusa.com/cgi-bin/nabc/product/b2c_product_detail.jsp?prod_id=DVD-HD841%252fXAA

Wonder how the sound quality is going to be?

Amazon has 'em for $190 and free shipping. I believe the MSRP is $250. There's a lot of talk about them over at AVS

here and here

There is a more upscale model, the DVD-HD941 due out next month. It has the Faroudja chip, black level adjustment, SACD & DVD-A, HDMI output with 6 ft. HDMI cable and HDMI to DVI adapter. MSRP $350. Amazon has a pre-order price of $290 with free shipping.

OK, that was the player I read about in HT, I did not know there was already a universal player with DVI out for that price.

So the main upgrade for the newer model is the HDMI?

The Samsung model, with DVI out, that has been available for a year is the 931 and it does NOT play SACD & DVD-A. The 841, with DVI out, just came out this month, and the 941, with HDMI out (compatible with DVI input equipped displays), comes out next month, and BOTH will play SACD and DVD-A. And yes, the big differences between the two are the Faroudja chip and HDMI out.

There are a lot of complaints, over at AVS, that the 841, like it's predecessor, the 931) won't pass blacker than black (don't ask me, I haven't the foggiest). It is hoped by all, myself included, that the 941's black level adjustment will correct that.

The Bravo D1, with DVI out, from V,INC ($199), came out a year ago has just been replaced by the Bravo D2 ($249). Neither play SACD or DVD-A. I had a D1 and now have the D2. Great PQ through the DVI out.

All the first edition, relatively inexpensive, DVI out players (D1, 931, Momitsu 880, etc.) had build and electronics quality problems. It is hope that the newer models (The D2, 841, and 941) will have corrected those problems

General question about these upconverting DVD players...

Is an upconverted signal available through the component video outputs, or only through the DVI output? I know that my TV doesn't have a DVI input, so an upconverted video signal would be of no value to me otherwise.

I honestly can't answer your question since I use the DVI output. I suggest you go over to the AVS forum and read the many threads about these DVD players, and/or do a google search and see what you can find.

From what I've read, without paying close attention, I'm reasonably sure the Zenith DVB318 upconverts (to 1080i, I THINK) through component, and has been getting comments that it's PQ rival the others through DVI. The Samsung 841 and 941 MIGHT upconvert through component, and the D2 doesn't. But check them out for yourself, to be sure. Erroneous facts are posted on forums all the time. (Except this one, of course )

It is widely regarded that the DVI/HDMI is best for digital, fixed pixel displays (plasma, DLP, LCD LCOS) and does not affect the picture quality for analog CRT TVS. The reason being that there needs to be an analog conversion done either by the TV or by the DVD player, and it does not really matter which one. But since a digital TV is digital, with DVI, the picture stays digital all the way from DVD to screen. Thus producing a better picture.

Some people do say there is a difference on large screen analog displays, but I have not seen it.

About black level, a good DVD player will be able to produce true black, however, many DVD players, such as the Samsungs, cannot reach true black. That is a complaint mainly for people who can get there rooms completely dark.
Also, the HD841 does have DCDi by Faroudja, it is what does the upconversion. Check out the link I posted above, you can see the DCDi logo on the player.

Or check out this link:
http://www.samsungusa.com/images/prod/product03/b2c_l_hd841.jpg

Check the first of the two links that I posted to AVS, scroll down to Post #13, and I think you'll find that the 841 does NOT have the Faroudja chip. The picture with the DCDi logo was a mistake, a picture of a prototype, or a picture of the 941 which WILL have the Faroudja chip.

In reply to:

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About black level, a good DVD player will be able to produce true black, however, many DVD players, such as the Samsungs, cannot reach true black.

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To get into the technical side on this (and maybe dispel some marketing hype), there are two different levels of black - NTSC broadcast black pedestal is 7.5 IRE, stations broadcasting blacks darker than this can be fined or have their tickets revoked by the CRTC (FCC in US?) analog TVs have circuitry to drop this dark grey to a good black. "Digital black" (R0 G0 B0) is pure black, one of many reasons DVCam/Digi8 (I believe DVCPro is however) is not broadcast legal (but it can be legalized). Digital black is a good pedestal for a digital screen (through VGA/DVI, etc).

Now, DVDs, the ugly little wannabes that they are, the little format that couldn't (can you tell I'm not a fan?) use MPEG-2 encoding, a lossy codec. Of course, the video needs to be compressed to fit on a 12cm diameter disc - but the capacity of the discs has changed since it was introduced - most of the first DVDs I saw were DVD-10s (double-sided, single density, 9.5GB capacity) but since both sides were straight silver, you had to read the imprint on the hub to determine what movie you had in your hand. The great unwashed said this could not be so - that they wanted colour imprints like CDs had, so enter the single sided, single layered DVD-5s we're stuck with now, with twice the compression and half the data. And what is the drawback of having only half the space of a DVD-10 (and a quarter of the largest capacity format - the DVD-18)? MPEG-2 works on I,P,B frames (intracoded, predictive, bidirectional) and macroblocks within the frames. Intracoded frames are compressed as a full frame, predictive and bidirectional frames are actually just "what has changed since the previous frame (for P) and the previous and next (for B)" in each macroblock - the smaller capacity of storage the video has to fit into, the higher the compression (like a crunchy JPG image) on the I frames, and the more "differences" the P and B frames have to ignore (which gets compounded every consecutive P or B frame - if a change isn't "caught" by one frame, that error is moved onto the next and next and next frames until another I frame comes up, which gives it a new clean slate to work from).

Voila... crawling blacks, jaggies on diagonal lines, chroma shift. To see the crawling blacks easier - turn off "extended blacks" if possible on your DVDP turn up the brightness on your TV and watch a DVD with a dark section - take Fellowship of the Ring, for instance, when the hobbits are hiding under the log and Frodo uses the ring, you'll see the "black areas" are actually big splotches of different shades of grey that pulse and move. Ugly! To make these less noticable, a lot of DVD players use black clamping, they grab say, the darkest 5%-10% of the visual spectrum and force it to become black, pretty much turning down the brightness, then reramp the gamma levels on the rest of the spectrum to expand it to fill what's left. The jaggies are usually processed away with an adaptive soften filter. And the chroma shift? Only the enthusiasts will notice that, and we only make up a small portion of the market, not enough to worry about - better the perfectionists end up with a crappier product than having Mrs. Smith have to squint to read each DVD hub when her half-wolf child empties the movie collection onto the floor one day and she has to return them to their cases.

The format could have been so much better.

Bren R.

Thanks for the informative read, Bren.

Do/Did you have a Betamax player at home?