HD Disc Players/Recorders

Testing of HD-DVD players will remain difficult until we have test discs that are not yet available—something like the HD equivalent of Digital Video Essentials. But here are a few preliminary results:

• The player displays above white and below black in component and above white in HDMI. It does not do below black in HDMI.

• On a standard definition luminance sweep (from the original Video Essentials DVD) the player showed a clean response up to about 5.5Mhz (typical of most good DVD players on this disc and pattern) with no visible, extraneous peaking or sharpening.

• The player's deinterlacing and scaling ranged from good to excellent on most tests in 1080i, falling to fair only on a couple of jagged-edge tests in 720p and on video scrolls over a film background, in which the video scroll broke up into jagged letters. Noteworthy were its excellent performance on the unflagged 3/2 pulldown test on the Faroudja test DVD, the racetrack bleacher test on the HQV Benchmark DVD, and the waving flag test on both of those discs—three tests that players often fail.