OTHER TECH

NUON: Licensed from VM Labs, NUON is a processing technology that expands your DVD player's processing capabilities. As Chris Chiarella described in his review of the NUON-equipped Samsung Extiva DVD player (November 2000), NUON lets you do things like set or change various player functions while a movie is running, zoom in on areas of the image, and create strobe effects. More-significant uses include the ability to play NUON-licensed video games. Future applications should allow Web browsing, e-mail, and video telephony.

Passing PLUGE: PLUGE (Picture Line-Up Generation Equipment) signals are found on video test discs and are used to help you properly set your TV's brightness control. Obviously, if the TV isn't set up correctly, the DVD's picture won't look as good as it should. Therefore, a DVD player's ability to pass PLUGE signals doesn't have an inherent effect on picture quality, but it may affect your ability to adequately and confidently set the brightness control on the TV. Price: This might seem incredibly obvious, but price should be a major consideration in your DVD-player purchase. Unless you want DVD-Audio, SACD, or progressive-scan capability, all of which require compatible equipment in your system, we haven't found much reason to spend a lot of money on a DVD player. Sure, certain features may add to the cost, but the performance of even the worst DVD players we've tested has been far superior to the best VCRs.

Progressive-scan output: In reality, discussing progressive-scanning requires an article of its own (and is planned for an upcoming issue). In a nutshell, nearly all DVDs are recorded in what's called a progressive format, also referred to as 480p (480 lines drawn on the screen, from top to bottom, every 1/60 of a second). Our current NTSC television system uses an interlaced system, referred to as 480i (480 lines drawn every 1/30 of a second, with 240 odd lines drawn in the first 1/60 of a second and 240 even lines drawn in the second 1/60 of a second. In theory, this is fast enough for the eye not to notice that the image is split in half). Normal DVD players take the 480p signal and interlace it. Progressive-scan players can preserve the 480p signal at the component output. This requires a TV with a wide-band component input (one that accepts 480p) and an image that can be drawn twice as fast as a normal TV image (one that scans at 31.5 kHz, instead of NTSC's 15.75 kHz). If you have such a display, like many HD monitors, a good progressive-scan DVD player will increase temporal resolution while eliminating motion artifacts exhibited with poor built-in line doublers. Keep in mind that some widescreen TVs don't offer aspect-ratio control with a 480p signal.

Recordable DVD: There are at least three (maybe four, depending on how you look at it) competing and incompatible recordable-DVD formats that will likely be available by the time you read this: DVD-RAM, DVD-R/RW, and DVD+RW. All of them have a 4.7-gigabyte capacity, which allows for up to four hours of recording time (two hours at DVD-like quality). DVD-R/RW discs should be backwards-compatible with most existing DVD players. DVD-R discs can only be recorded once and should be more compatible than DVD-RW discs. DVD-RW discs are re-recordable (rewritable) and can be used nearly 1,000 times. DVD-RAM is only compatible with other DVD-RAM recorders or DVD-RAM-compatible players, of which there are few. DVD+RW is backwards-compatible with current players (in a different way than DVD-RW), but it isn't available yet. What's our take? This is a lame format war that doesn't need to exist. If you have to have the latest and greatest, flip a coin and pick one. Otherwise, don't worry about it in terms of your current DVD-player purchase. You might, however, want to tell your VCR that it only has a couple of years left before retirement.

SACD: Super Audio CD is a format competing with DVD-Audio and is currently available in players from Sony, Philips, and Marantz. These players only offer two channels of high-resolution audio, although future players should have 5.1-channel capability. The two-channel version's analog output is compatible with any audio system. The 5.1-channel system will require a 5.1-channel input on your receiver or preamp. Some SACD software, called hybrid discs, are compatible with "Red Book" (the name of the CD-specifications manual) CD players. This is a nice way to say that hybrid discs may not play on all CD players, particularly that cheap, off-brand one that you got on sale for $17.95 at Crazy Eddie's. Do you need SACD? About as much as you need DVD-Audio. At least one manufacturer (Pioneer) includes both SACD and DVD-Audio in the same player. Within a couple of years, this should be common practice.