The Pioneer Elite
BDP-09FD Blu-ray player -- its first with BD-Live, featuring 4GB of storage -- is finally official. Blu-ray discs will have their video treated to Pioneer's 16-bit video processor, Marvell QDEO and Renesas processing, including 24p support, plus the company's Adaptive bit Length Expansion that claims it restores 8-bit color on disc to the original 16-bit studio master. The audio side is treated to eight Wolfson Audio DACs, delivering full decoding and bit-stream output for all those high-res audio formats the kids like so much in a truly superior fashion. Dual HDMI 1.3a outputs capable of splitting or duplicating the workload, RS-232C control and heavy solid steel construction just further the point -- if you'd like to pay more than the price of a PS3 for a fully featured Blu-ray player, here's a good reason. The only truly sad news is that the $2,199 price and "2008" release date remain unchanged.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
adam @ Sep 4th 2008 12:21PM
Other than Live 2.0, which is irrrelevant to most of us....Somebody please explain why anybody would choose this unit over the Denon 3800 with the top of the line HQV chip?...
Harmin C. @ Sep 4th 2008 4:32PM
Because the Qdeo upscaling is as good as the HQV Reon?? I own the LG Bh200 which has the same Qdeo upscaler and it passed every single one of the benchmarks for the HQV disc that my XA2 did. The only difference being that HQV gave a slightly sharper image while the Qdeo was softer and smoother. But otherwise both are nearly identical.
Most people just assume that HQV is the best and therefore anything else sucks, but you should look it up and read more on it. The Qdeo is impressive in its own right. If HQV is top tier so is the Qdeo.
Ken @ Sep 4th 2008 12:25PM
Yet the fan boys will still say the PS3 is better (price aside).
Fargus @ Sep 4th 2008 12:56PM
What about the load times? Unless it is just as fast as a PS3, Im not interested. As bad as it sounds, I have the money burning a hole in my pocket to get a top of the line player like this, but until I hear of load times being on par with a PS3, im not interested.