Originally posted by highdef
Unfortunately you'll have to fork over at least some $750 dollars if you truly want a "real" progressive scan benefit from your HDtv.

Originally posted by highdef
Most of the cheaper progressive scan players should be called "progressive SCAM!"
The differences in picture quality is night and day; especially when played over an HDtv.

Pioneer DV-38A

This is the fancier sibling of the DV-37 we reviewed in the last shootout, and its video performance was essentially identical. The deinterlacing performance was poor, even for a flag-reading player, and its chroma bug is fairly bad. There was more ringing on this player than on most of the others we looked at. This gives the image a very sharp crisp look that so many people are after. This works ok on a CRT, but is distracting on a digital display like the Sony 10HT we used.

On the plus side, the DV-38A (like the DV-37) does have motion-adaptive video deinterlacing, which puts it ahead of most of the pack when watching video material. But while good video deinterlacing is a great thing, and much to be desired, it's the film deinterlacing that you pay good money for a progressive player for. And here the Pioneer does not do well. It has worse bad-edit detection than any of the players in the shootout (7 combs on Big Lebowski, for example), and combed in places that no other player did.

The player has an interesting control that allows you to adjust "Pure Progressive" from "fast" to "slow," which actually seems to be adjusting the balance between temporal and spatial interpolation in the video deinterlacing algorithms. We found this fascinating, but largely worthless to the end user.

Frankly, for this much money, Pioneer could do much, much better. As you'll see when you read the write-up for the Pioneer Elite 510 TV, clearly Pioneer has a good quality deinterlacing chipset. We don't understand why they didn't use it for this player.

Pioneer DV-37

This player has some very nice features, and a much improved remote compared to earlier models. It also is an improvement on the previous elite models, the DV-09 and DV-05. Unlike them, the DV-37 has no significant chroma delay, and the ringing is improved. That said, we were still disappointed with this player. It has the worst chroma upsampling artifact of any of the players reviewed. We couldn’t imagine how someone could watch "Toy Story" on this player and not notice the jagged streaks on almost every red object in the movie. And, we noticed the problem on almost every movie we used in the testing, even when we weren’t looking for the problem. The red streaks were that bad.

The de-interlacing performance was not very good either. It's a flag-reading player, and like every other flag-reading player in the showdown, the Pioneer does fine when it’s fed perfect material with perfect flags. (As we mentioned, this is one reason you see so many glowing reviews of players by other magazines. They are using terrific DVDs to review them. Most players will get a good report as such. It is really necessary to test them with difficult DVDs to discover the true capabilities of players.) But when the flags are wrong, the DV-37 is not up to the task. The player clearly uses the flags on the disc to make decisions, so it combed on many of the tests with bad or unusual flags. It also dropped to video mode when it didn’t need to. Interestingly, the player combed in places that no other player combed, even other players that use the flags, for example the film that plays behind the “Special Features” menu in "Galaxy Quest".

The ringing on this player isn’t as bad as the DV-09, but it’s still too high, well above average for this group. Turning all detail and sharpness settings down on the player made the problem slightly better, but even after every setting was at zero, the player still had worse ringing problems than any other player in the showdown.

While looking at discs with this player, we saw a strange problem with the WHQL credits roll -- it looked like it was blocky and flickering. All the players had minor flicker problems here, but the DV-37 was a whole order of magnitude worse.