Sylvania DVL-1000F HDMI DVD player with Faroudja DCDi chip

[waltchan]

Has anyone tried the Sylvania DVL-1000F HDMI upconverting DVD player yet? It comes with a Faroudja DCDi video chip. I know it's made by Funai, but does any HDMI DVD player with a Faroudja video chip mean better picture quality?

[manono]

Hi-

I know it's made by Funai, but does any HDMI DVD player with a Faroudja video chip mean better picture quality?

Not necessarily. I'd guess that most MPEG decoders produce a pretty decent picture with progressively encoded film based material. Where having Faroudja benefits you the most is in problematic DVDs. Those shot on video will be deinterlaced as well as any chipset and better than most. Those with weird encoding and flagging issues will be handled better than most. If you watch a lot of anime or TV series DVDs, it'll pay to have a Faroudja chipset for a lot of them. I assume that you have the Faroudja FLI2300 chipset in your player. About 2/3 of the way down this page is a discussion of the Faroudja chipsets, their capabilities and limitations:

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_7_4/dvd-benchmark-part-5-progressive-10-2000.html