Upgraded my Home cinema abit
Just I made the plunge and finally upgraded some elements of the home cinema by the inclusion of firstly a Pioneer 575A DVD player which also plays back DVD-A, SACD, DVD-R/RW, CDR, Divx, jpg and MP3 files! It has progressive scan on component video outs and it plays very nicely to.
Next up was the screen so I choose after many hours reading the forums over at AVForums a Panasonic PWD6. I am still waiting for the stand to arrive but so far I am very impressed with the performance of the screen particularly when driven from the component outputs of the 575A with progressive scan enabled. Buying a screen like this isn’t a light proposition so if you are contemplating it then please head over the AVForums.
September 29th, 2005 at 5:33 pm
Just thought I would update on how this equipment has been as it usually takes a few months to get the best out of it, and for a Plasma it takes a while to settle in - achieving its best picture performance after a couple of hundred hours use.
Well the Panasonic PWD6 Plasma is certainly amazing, its screen is big enough for our small flat, though of course you do get used to it, and after being careful about the burn in problems one can face with leaving a static image on the screen for too long or having HUD from a console its been great. Any problems with burn in after a long session can be counteracted by using the screensaver which can put a white bar accross the screen for a configurable amount of time.
To get the best out of it you really do have to invest in your sources, and after many 3rd party cables I ended up with a proper component cable for the Xbox. This gives the best possible quality from the Xbox and has a TosLink (optical) digital out for surround sound. Best of all if your Xbox supports NTSC regions, it will do HDTV output which the PWD6 will render very nicely.
The Pioneer DVD575A has been great, and after upgrading the firmware via downloading a disc image, burning it, then running it on the player its range of formats only got better. The only complaint I would issue against the player is that its really slow to load media. Much slower than the cheaper decks. Again I am using its component output but this time into the VGA input of the PWD6. This is something that later Panasonic Plasmas don’t have on board as standard.