Customer Reviews

Magnavox 1080p Upconvert DVD Player

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Awhile ago, I started conjuring up ways to get blu-ray quality without spending a fortune. At first, I bought a Philips upconverting DVD player for about 50 bucks. I popped in "The Dark Knight" and I noticed a difference, but the picture was very grainy at times. It looked better, but you could virtually see remnants of the upconversion process on certain darker scenes. Ultimately, I was not impressed. I returned the machine.

My next idea was to stream high quality videos from my PC to my HDTV via a DVI/HDMI cable. This produced excellent results for the most part, as long as the original file was high quality. The files are demanding on my PC at times. I had to overclock my CPU and my video card just to run most of them. Overall, if you have a high quality video on your computer, then this works well.

Recently, I had to move out of an apartment that I hadn't visited in months. Low and behold, I found my old DVD library which contains probably 150+ standard DVD's. So I decided to give the Upconvert DVD player another chance. I'm so glad I did. I was browsing Wal-Mart and found this model for $38. It's been the best purchase I've made all year. Let me just state, first and foremost, that this player blows the Philips player out of the water. Not only that, but it was cheaper.

I returned home from the store tonight and popped in a backed-up copy of "The Village" simply because it was on the first page of my storage case. Wow. Simply breathtaking. The picture is stellar. The colors are rich and deep. There is virtually no pixelation or distortion. It really does look like Blu-Ray! The picture was so good that I didn't want to take the movie out, so I ended up watching the entire film!

Setup is very easy. I plugged in the power cord and attached the HDMI cable from the back of the box to the back of my TV. I'm using an older 32'' LCD HDTV (720p I believe) and a very cheap HDMI cable. This thing can play just about anything, including burnt DVD's, burnt CD's and photos.

Two things you will want to know:

*There is no USB connector. Not a big deal at all for me.

*This thing seems to take a little bit to warm up. I'm not kidding. For example, the first scene does not seem as good as the second and third one. This could be a fluke, but it seems almost as if the DVD player gets better at upconverting as the movie progresses. This is probably just my imagination. I popped in "Goldeneye 007" and for the first 15-30 seconds it seemed distorted a bit. In no time flat, it looked perfect. This did not happen with, "The Village". Again, this could be nothing at all, I just want to mention it here in case someone else notices it, too.

Two final pieces of advice:

1. Don't buy this here. Go to your local Wal-Mart store and get it for under 40 bucks. Also, don't worry about buying a pricier model. It backfired for me with the Philips model. This is the best I've used so far. Also, I don't think there is any difference between "upscaling" vs. "upconverting". This is just semantics. Buy this player!

2. Don't buy a pricey HDMI cable -- the cheap ones work just as well. You can find them here for under 5 dollars, whereas other retail locations will charge you as much as $60 for their special "high quality HDMI cable". Absolute rubbish.

You won't regret buying this player, I promise.