HDMI issues with Marantz DV7001

[admin_exported]

Hi everybody,

I recently got me an full HD Panasonic plasma screen and was hoping for a sublime image with my Marantz DV7001 player. But that's not the case. Although the Marantz DV7001 DVD player is rated with high praise about picture and sound quality, I have some annoying issues with this player. Hope you can help me.

First, I hope you are familiar with the ISF HDTV Calibration Wizard DVD. It's a DVD with very simplified options for setting the basic adjustments on the screen (more) correct. One of the testimages is for setting the contrast right. This is done with an image of man with a white shirt that has white buttons. The purpose of this image is to set the contrast not to high, so that all white detail stays preserved.

Well, here I have a problem with my Marantz DV7001 DVD player. Over scart rgb or component the picture looks okay, with good white detail. But when using the HDMI (native 576p of upscaling to 1080p), the white image is all washed out and white details get lost. On the shirt the white buttons are no longer visible. Lowering the contrast of my Panasonic plasma screen doesn't help. And the image contrast settings in the players setup don't work on HDMI.
Also in movies I can see that white detail is better with scart RGB than with HDMI.
I also tried this with my Samsung BD player over HDMI (and 1080p upscaling). Then the image looks just fine with all detail preserved. Personally at the moment it is my experience that the upscaled DVD image of the Samsung BD player is better than the Marantz picture.

I have a second issue with the DV7001. On my Full HD plasma screen I can set the overscan OFF.
The benefit is that you see the whole image. The Marantz indeed shows the whole image with 0% overscan. But on the right side of the screen is a black bar visible. So the image is complete, but on the right side it is one inch to small, leaving a small black bar.
With a 1080i image, overscan is alos 0%, and then the image is almost screenfilling. Now on the right side there is a tiny black bar. So, it's not perfect, but almost.
But because of this, the plasma screen obvious doesn't perform a 1:1 pixelmapping. And again, when looking at an upscaled image, the Samsung BD player shows a more detailled image (with 0% overscan and no black bars) than the Marantz.
To be complete: a 480p and 576p image is not correctly centered with the Marantz. On the left and bottom it showes about 1% overscan. On the top and right side it shows 4% overscan.

So, my question. Are these issues just faults on my player or do all DV7001 players have this?
And what to do about it?

Thanks.

 

[Anonymous]

With the help of an ISF technician I did some reading and checking.

It seems that the DV7001 has a fault in the HDMI signalm where it gives a PC RGB level signal, which should be a Studio RGB level signal. Over scart and component it's correct.
Strangely that the DVI Output Range can not be changed and is at it's default value Standard. But that seems not correct.

The geometry fault in the 1080p signal was already adressed by different users in aug/sept last year, but sofar it seems that Marantz has not yet issued a fix for it.