HD DVD - with AVI/DIVX

[admin_exported]

Hi folks,

Thanks to the advice given out on this forum plus some digging around, I bought a TH42PZ85B back at the start of July.

I now want to look into buying a dvd player (HD preferably) to replace my old Tosh SD230. HD is preferable like I say, but I don't want to pay anything too silly price wise. Particularly though, I want the player to be able to play avi/divx straight off a memory stick. It's a long time since I bought a dvd player and I'm out of the loop as to whether this feature is 'standard' these days.

Any recommendations you guys would like to throw my way ? I was going to pay around the £250 mark, but could go a shade higher.

Thanks all.
Mike.

 

[professorhat]

When you say you want HD, do you mean you want a standard DVD player which can upscale or do you want a Blu-Ray player?

 

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I think maybe my budget constraints might guide your answer (?). I said about £250, but I'd go up to £300 say. I'm not sure if Blu-Ray players come into that price bracket. If they do, then yes I'd look into one. If they don't, I suspect an upscaled one would be sufficient - (for my purposes I hasten to add!).

I'm not sure how marked the difference is between Blu Ray and upscaled pictures, and whether my "so so" eyesight could really tell.

What I am keen to include though is that AVI/DIVX feature. if I could stick a pen disk in the side of a machine, that's a neat little trick. Is AVI/DIVX a common feature these days in dvd/blu ray players ?

Thanks for any thoughts you could put forward - I've had and read some great advice these last couple of months here in the forum.

 

[professorhat]

You can indeed get a number of Blu-Ray players at that price - check out the Reviews on this site. A couple of them are DivX compatible but it doesn't say if they have USB sockets or not for this purpose, except for the PS3 which might actually be perfect in this respect.
Given you have a Full HD TV, the picture from Blu-Ray will be significantly better than an equivalently priced DVD upscaler so i would definitely look into this. If you read through the reviews though, it will also comment on each player's ability to upscale standard DVDs as well, so make sure you get one good at both and you'll have the best of both worlds.