Borrowed a DVD5 for 3 days

Hi

Thought I'd let you all know the experiences I have had with the new DVD5. Current player is a Pioneer 737.

As the subject says, I managed to get my hands on a DVD5 for a few days a few weeks ago

First off, it's got a good weight to it, secondly, it certainly fits in with all the 5 series stuff.

Onto the nitty gritty, the power on cycle is certainly nifty, nice naim logo as it all turns itself on.

Inserting a disc is on a tray as has been said, the front cover of the tray folds down and the tray then slides out. The transport is the same as Arcam use I believe, along with a lot of other companies. The tray motor is a little on the noisy side but nothing major. The tray is a bit on the flimsy side, but again due to limitations on dvd transports there's not alot naim could do without designing and building their own transport at major cost.

The player menus are uncluttered and all well laid out, every function I tried had a little help text that can be brought up as well, all very useful. The menus also fade in and fade out which is cool.

Onto the picture - used a few different DVDs, the first that came to mind was the second Mummy film for lots of cgi, explosions, gunshots and lots of changes in lighting. The pictures were pin sharp, pausing on pyrotechnics and swords showed images that were amazingly detailed with no jagged lines whatsoever. It did show up a lot of bad editing and cgi on the film which was not entirely unexpected. Back to my original DVD player showed jagged lines and mosaic effects on the screen everywhere, bleurgh!

Used a number of scenes out of the reconditioned Star Wars Episode IV. C3P0 showed reflections in his casework and amazing details within the dinks around his head and torso. Colouring of the gold was amazingly detailed. Frame updates throughout the film were amazingly quick with no picture break during very fast moving scenes. The final battle scene on the death star is something to behold, shockingly good considering how old the original film is and the amount of work that has been put into the restoration of the film.

This leads us onto the sound - absolutely stunning. The detail and clarity and handling of the sounds round 5.1 is awe inspiring. Noise coming straight at your sounds like is really is coming across the room and out the back, some choice expletives were used during some scenes, enough to make you want to duck!

Onto the downsides, there are still some bugs in the software of which a number have been fixed. The only additional one I came across was after leaving the Star Wars disc in overnight, I couldn't get the unit to come out of powersave, did get the sounds finally but no picturem, this required a power cycle to resolve.

There are some more upsides, the picture in picture zoom is cool, the remote is very good and would replace the Av2 & pre-amp/cd remotes but there is no tuner option on it though not having a tuner, this wouldn't affect me. There is also a 5 disc memory which is automatic, take a film out midway, play something else and put the first disc back in and it automatically starts from the point it left off at.

Now comes the most interesting part, would I buy one?

Now, I did have the option of buying one in the shop there and then and could have walked out straight away with one under my arm though it would have had to be set up properly to match everything I've got.

Would I buy one? Without a doubt! Would I buy one right now? If I had no DVD player then that is a resounding yes. But, I do have a DVD player which is adequate for my needs at this time. For the amount of available free time I have at the moment, it is not worth my while replacing my current player though it is aging, if it died tomorrow, I would put an order straight in. With my limited leisure time at the moment, music has more immediacy than a film so I would rather build that side up then come back to the DVD side.

Oh, I did play a bad disc, that being Red Dwarf which has damn bad encoding off the back of a crap master. The DVD5 made a good job of a terrible encoding, much better than my current player managed it.

Hope this has been a useful overview to you all.

Regards,

Steve.