The DivX Player Shootout

Sony’s offering looks cute, as it's a miniaturized version of a regular chassis, but no other fancy design. The player is light, yet has sturdiness. The facade is a highly reflective black plastic, with flush buttons on the right extremity. The player comes bundled with decent connectivity options: a discrete 5.1 analog audio output, with both Dolby and DTS decoding. There is a USB 2.0 slot in the front. A component and composite video output garner all the attention here, as there is no HDMI out. Wierd. Thus we had to use the component out, and set the progressive scan on, to see how this player handles de-interlacing.

Test patterns and videos were employed to see the de-interlacing of the unit. The motion and sharpness were good, but quite frankly not upto the mark. I’m saying this, as little artifacts were seen here and there, edges were funny etc. But this is a problem in small quantities. It was largely a good image. Luminance was above average, plus color wise no complaints at all, the entire spectrum was visually pleasant, and represented well with no sign of bleeding and over saturation of any hue.� This really deserves praise, as these “cheaper” DVD players do not get the colors right always.

We then switched to our DivX to see how it handles film content. Here there was no visible or serious stutter. The video was smooth. The color was great as I said, though a little ‘banding’ was present here and there.