Customer Reviews

New Pioneer DV 420K - All Region Free Multi System / Multi Region 1080p DVD Player with HDMI Upconverting & USB

5 star:		(81)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

When we moved to the USA, we had a shock. In the UK, multi-region DVD players are common, with cheap models retailing for the equivalent of $50 or less in every supermarket. Add to that the fact that 90% of TVs will play NTSC signals, as used in the USA and Asia, and playing discs from other countries is as easy as can be. Over here, most TVs will only display NTSC, and not the PAL signals used in Europe. Also, the vendors have severely locked down DVD players by region, so American consumers can't play foreign DVDs.

Well, I brought with me a collection of 150 DVDs from the UK, Europe, Hong Kong, China and Japan. I refuse to buy them again, since in many cases I picked the best version available. Even if I did plan to re-purchase them, many are simply not available in an American, Region 1 disc.

Although players are available on the cheap in the UK, I spent a little extra on a Pioneer player in 2003, which is still in use by a family member now. It had a great picture quality on our widescreen CRT TV, and played any disc I threw at it - even a badly authored disc which many other machines refused to touch. This made a Pioneer player the obvious choice now we needed a new unit.

But some things had changed: We needed a player suitable for a 42" 1080p HDTV, rather than a 28" widescreen CRT. The size and the nature of the display is much less forgiving when it comes to picture quality. It also needed to convert PAL colours to NTSC whilst upscaling the image (and not downscaling it first). This meant there was an element of the unknown when it came to picking our player.

I am happy to report that this player works perfectly. It is built as well as you would expect a $90 player to be built, so don't expect a 20lb chunk of metal. The remote is the same layout as my 7-year old player in the UK, and it has one of the most logical button layouts I've used. Even the on screen menus and displays match that old player. They may not look fancy, but they tell you everything you need to know.

The player is a Japanese version, designed for tourists. It will output PAL or NTSC, and it works on American and European voltages. Change the power cable and you can use this in the UK without a step converter. It's truly an international DVD player.

Using HDMI, Pioneer's Kuro link is available. European users will remember this from the SCART days -- when you power on the player it switches your TV input automatically to the just-activated unit. The manual claims it only works with Pioneer TVs, but my Philips TV has a similar function (as used by the Philips Blu-Ray player attached to it), and it works just the same on my TV. There are other connections on the back of the player, but I see no reason to use them over HDMI. One downside is that there's no HDMI cable included.

So... picture quality. I'm comparing this to the upscaling performed by my Philips Blu Ray player. Obviously I could only test US, Region 1, NTSC DVDs on that player, so the comparison is by no means complete. Regardless, upscaling from 480i to 1080p is of a very high quality, even if detail levels pale in comparison to HD. My Japanese version of Kill Bill Vol. 1 looks great, with the bright colours blaring out at us. Switching to The New World - Director's Cut shows that the upscaling features of this unit outstrip the $100 Philips Blu ray. That player exhibited quite a bit of Haloing and edge enhancement without adding details. Those effects are still present, but much less obvious.

The player will, however, show up low quality discs. My HK R3 edition of House Of Flying Daggers looks atrocious. Pretty much unwatchable. It's a low quality transfer of a visually difficult film, so this should come as no surprise.

On to PAL discs. Out of the box, the player outputs to 480p. Taking a DVD with a vertical resolution of 576 lines and downscaling it as such, the picture quality is nasty to say the least. If you are stuck with a SD NTSC TV, at least they will play. The good news is that with the HDMI set to output at 1080p, the player does not downscale to 480 before upscaling to 1080 - it takes the 576i signal and directly converts it to 1080p! This means that PAL discs look incredibly sharp. With 20% more vertical detail to work with, the upscaler can produce incredibly good images for your HDTV.

I tested the UK DVD of The Incredibles, which has as perfect a transfer as DVD is capable of, and it looked stunning. The chase sequence through the jungle looked as good as I have ever seen it. Compared to NTSC DVDs, this was a revelation. Following this, I tried an old edition of Father Ted on DVD. Produced for TV in a 4:3 ratio, I expected to see numerous interlacing/combing effects, but the show looked as good as one could expect of a 15-year-old TV show filmed on video tape, and no real problems were apparent. We followed this with an episode of Spaced and an episode of The IT Crowd, both produced in 16:9, and in the case of the latter, very recent. They looked great.

In fact, the only thing giving away the conversion process was a slight judder to the end credits of all three TV shows. While watching fast motion, this was not evident. Raiders Of The Lost Ark looked good, regardless of the action on screen.

One note regarding colours -- my TV is already set up to display Blu Ray and HDTV with pretty accurate, natural colours. This unit was rather dark out of the box. We set the HDMI colour to Component and made minor Brightness/Contrast adjustements using a THX Optimizer, but things still appeared a little dark on PAL discs. The solution? We adjusted the Gamma setting to -3 and it solved all our problems.

There is more to this player. It will record your CDs to a USB drive plugged in to the front of the unit. I haven't tried that one yet. Also, it will play DivX and AVI movies from USB, CD or DVD. AVI rips of some UK TV shows and the Berlin premier of the restored Metropolis both looked better that on a computer monitor, thanks to the upscaler's help. The playable formats are very limited, but it's a nice extra feature.

So, in conclusion: if you have many foreign DVDs, buy this player. Even if you don't, it's worth it as a dedicated DVD player, since it has better upscaling that the average supermarket Blu-Ray player. Well worth every penny, and it could only be improved by including an HDMI cable in the box.

Bought this after hunting around for a DVD player and getting thoroughly confused by the different options available. My requirements were as follows:

1) I wanted a Multi region player since I have discs from India and the US and I also make my own at home.

2) I wanted a USB input on the player and preferably the ability to play DivX files

3) I wanted to have the option to use HDMI at a later stage when I purchase a HDTV

I rejected all the Philips DVP series players because of poor reviews I found in other brand reviews (like for other Pioneer players). Many of them said those didnt last long. I am not fond of SONY because SONY has the reputation of being very selective about what it plays and is very fussy when it comes to slightly damaged discs.

I chose this because most Pioneer players had wonderful (if fewer) reviews and I decided to try it out. It arrived fast and it works great. I have used the standard component cables to connect it to my CRT TV and it works great. The unit is very light and sleek (black) and comes with a component cable and two power cables (one for the US socket and the other for the European I assume). I am yet to try the USB input though. The Dv-420vk is one of the newer Pioneer models compared to the 610 and others. I saw this on the Pioneer website selling for around the same price.

One quick tip: look for the other sellers when buying this product because the "featured merchant" seems to be charging a premium for both the product and the shipping. I bought it from NewEra products and it arrived in good time and great shape.

When I began to look for a multi-regional player I read the review from Skinny Guy and got hooked. My wife and daughter love to watch Bollywood, German, and videos from the UK. I had purchased a rather complicated system for them to do so about 5 years ago which also played their VHS from other regions. It drove my wife bonkers trying to constantly switch from one device to the other and she finally would only watch those movies when we were all present. We purchased our first HD TV earlier this year and this player with its up-scaling capabilities has made viewing everything in our library a true joy. Just insert any DVD and press play. The instructions state that you can only play in your area but they are incorrect. If you really want to watch everything from anywhere in the world, then buy this unit!!

We just purchased two of these from Worldwide Distributors and are returning them both. The product is advertised as a multi region dvd player and we wished to use it to view region 2 dvds. We cannot. Both units play only region one dvds. Pioneer, when called, said they do not make a multi region player. Pioneer also said that some of these sets are hacked overseas to play multi region dvds, but none of the Pioneer brand sold in the U.S. will do that. They get many calls about this from disappointed consumers.

The customer service number for Pioneer is 1-800-421-1404. I suggest checking with them before making a purchase.

A note: We had purchased a different model # (still Pioneer brand) from VCT Electronics last year, and that worked fine to play region 2 dvds. Multi region dvd players seem to be a product where the buyer needs to beware.

The description on this item is "Multi Region Code Zone Free" which states it will play any DVD with any region code; however, what it doesn't explain is that you have to pick the "ONE" region code you want this to be able to play. It WILL NOT play "ALL" regions. This information is misleading and when I received the product, it was for Region #4 ONLY. I contacted the company and was informed that this only plays 1 region and you have to specify when ordering which region you want. When I placed the order, there wasn't any type of option or information stating that you had to pick the region you wanted.

Needless to say, I returned the DVD player.

Thank you and have a Nice Day!

I bought this for Christmas as we are British now living in the USA and need a multi region DVD to play our DVD collection.

I thought this model would be perfect but how wrong I was.

It did not play Region 2 DVDs. I got the error that it was the wrong region. I called the seller VCT -Voltage Converter Transformers and they were not very helpful. In fact they were lying to me. Instead of admitting a mistake which can happen to any company, they insisted this unit would have been checked by them. It clearly had not. Then they asked if this was a BBC or Disney DVD as they had had problems with these companies.

In a word VCT are a joke and I would not recommend buying from them. Sitting here on Dec 23rd there is nothing we can now do. VCT have sold us something that does not work.

On the other hand Amazon were very professional when I called. They have given me an advanced refund as I spend a lot with Amazon and in 8 years of using them nearly every week I have never had to leave a bad review until now.

I ordered this DVD player in order to be able to play European-format DVDs as well as US-format. Since I had recently purchased my first HD TV set, I also ordered an HDMI cable (very inexpensively through another Amazon vendor.) The carton is labeled "For sale only to foreign tourists in Japan", and does not carry a Pioneer USA warranty, but it comes well packaged and with an instruction booklet in clear English. The initial setup requires setting both the resolution (default = 480) and the aspect ratio (default = 4:3) of the TV set. After I figured that out, everything was perfect. I have just gotten my first German PAL-format DVDs, and the player automatically senses the format. The playback quality is great.

I purchased this product specifically to play UK DVDs. It does not work inspite of the fact that the specs claim it will play on regions. A total lie and now I've got to send it back.

Update: The DVD player now works. It turns out the shipping company forgot to set the player for all regions. A simple change executed by me, at their instruction, fixed the problem and I'm now happily enjoying my program.

I purchased this item specifically for its Multi-Region Code Zone Free capability but it does not play discs from the UK. I used to play them successfully on my Philips player but lost the remote so ordered this unit to replace it. So I now have to go through the hassle of returning this item.

This is a follow-up review. The player is multi-region but the distributor had forgotten to program it as such before delivery. I found out how to do it on the internet and then the distributor emailed with instructions. Works fine now.

I did lots of research for a multi region dvd player having recently moved to the US from UK. I settled on this player as it had good reviews on other sites as well as Amazon.

Sadly I got the one that wouldn't load any discs whatsoever! even when there was a disc inside it said "loading disc" for about 10mins or "no disc".

Sent it back, got full refund, have now ordered a sony and hope that works!!.