how does my pioneer 757ai compare with players of today

[admin_exported]

hi there. i was wondering do you still rate the pioneer 757ai iv had it about 4 years it cost me over 6 hundred quid and its been a fantastic player. how does it compare with something around the same price of today. my friends got the toshiba hde1 and says its beter because it can upscale and has hdmi but after comparing the two i cant see mutch in it myself. i use the supra av3 conponent cable. i like to keep up with the times so is it worth me upgrading to something better thanks

 

[Anonymous]

For movie material I would say the deinterlacing (progressive scan) of the Tosh and the Pioneer are equal.

The upscaling in the Tosh is OK, some edge enhancement, but very capable. This would have to be compared to the scaling performance of your TV.

However build quality on the Pioneer is far superior. The mpeg decoder (the thing that takes the detail from the disc and actually turns it into video information for the deinterlacer to work with) is outstanding on the 757 (same one in the 868 and 989 as I remember). The Tosh has a less detailed to picture to work with from the beginning as it uses a cheap chip for this process (all the budget went into the HD decoder instead).

Audio is no contest - Pioneer gets it.

HDMI advantage though goes to the Tosh as there won't be much transmission loss compared to the Pioneer. Perhaps this is in some way making up for the detail loss the Tosh has where it has poorer mpeg decoding.

Personally I would keep the Pioneer. Plus it also gives you SACD and DVD-A....

 

[Clare Newsome]

I'd go with Liam on that comparison with the Tosh - but the story could be different with higher-end HD players. We've tested them all for the next issue (out August 23rd), including comparing their DVD and CD replay with dedicated DVD players at different prices....

 

[D.J.KRIME]

I had a Pioneer 757Ai and after recently upgrading my plasma to a 50"" hd one found that on certain dvds especialy during dark periods that there was a lot of smearing. So I borrowed a friends Denon with hdmi and upscaling and tried the same disk and no smearing. I put the smearing down to the fact that the Pioneer had no digital link to the screen as well as the upscaling process being done by the screen.
The result was I ended up upgrading the 757Ai to a Denon DVD 3930 which I got for £550 ex-demo and the differnce is breath-taking. I have it wired up via aQED hdmi and set to 720p and all traces of smearing have vanished, but more importantly the whole picture has inproved from colour delivery to delivery of great solid blacks. Cd palyback is also better than that of the Pioneer. And as easy as pie to make multi-region.
I personaly am not ready to comit to either HD format just yet, and from what I have seen of any HD player, none of them do any where near as good a job as my Denon with dvd or cd.