Don’t Be ‘Beta Tester’ for Blu-ray, HD DVD, U.K.’s Arcam Urges Consumers

“The DV137 is a truly universal player and a great reason not to be a beta-tester for Blu-ray and HD-DVD,” Brennan said. “The premature launch is all about a land-grab for royalties,” Brennan said. “The blue laser format war is the CE industry’s Iraq. There is no exit strategy.” John Dawson, Arcam founder, agreed, saying he believes the blue laser formats will not be safe to buy or sell for 2 years.

The DV137 goes on sale in Europe next month for about $2,400 and in the U.S. in June for about $2,000, Arcam said. A companion piece, the AVR350 7.1-channel home theater receiver, will retail for about $2,700 in Europe and $2,500 in the U.S. At $2,000, the upscaling DVD player is 4 times more expensive than Toshiba’s entry-level HD-A1 HD DVD player and twice the price of Blu-ray players from Samsung and Sony.

The DV137 upscales 480p DVDs to 720p, 1080i, 1080p or 768p for HDMI output. Arcam claimed that after close work with chip-maker Zoran, its is the first to use a chip with Anchor Bay’s upscaling algorithms on the Zoran Vaddis 888S processor. Besides upscaled DVD through the HDMI output, the DV137 has SD-interlaced analog composite and RGB outputs. They're “always on,” regardless of the upscaled progressive signal selected for HDMI output. So, the player can feed SD displays in other rooms. The player also supplies a calibration signal for screen color, brightness and contrast adjustment. Besides DVDs, it handles audio discs such as DVD-Audio, SACD and CDs, and decodes DVD-Rs and CD-Rs in the MP3 and WMA compression platforms to give massive music- storage capacity. Another important touch is audio delay from 0 to 150 millisec., to correct lip-sync with virtually any receiver or screen that delays the picture because of image signal-processing.

Although legally blocked from revealing any option to hack DVD’s regional coding -- without which it’s very hard to sell any DVD player in Europe -- Arcam Brand Mgr. Geoff Meads gave reporters a nudge & wink. “If someone bought a player in Europe and then moved to the U.S.,” he said carefully, “there is a simple modification that would let them play American [Region 1] discs.” The player also converts NTSC to PAL and vice versa. Arcam’s AVR350 home theater receiver employs a clever and novel means of reducing interference. The receiver uses a “stealth mat” -- wire matting used to shield aircraft from radar detection -- to absorb the high- frequency hash that can leak from player’s and receiver’s HDMI circuitry and add noise to the audio.

Arcam continues to provide analog outputs because there’s “no satisfactory solution yet to converting SD to HDMI,” Meads said. HDMI licenses prohibit upscaled video through the analog component output. In the blue laser Blu- ray and HD DVD formats, content owners have the option to insert an Image Constrain Token on the discs to down-rez the 1920x1080 resolution to 960x540 through the analog component output -- about twice the resolution of DVDs but only about 1/4 of HD resolution. Most studios have said they don’t plan to use the ICT -- but retain the option.

Arcam used the DV137 to demonstrate DVDs on a Pioneer 50W plasma HDTV at 720p. The display of movies and music- video live concerts was very impressive, backing Arcam’s advertising claims that the player is a good reason why “you should wait two years before touching HD DVD or Blu-ray.”