Sony 300+1 DVP-CX860 DVD Player – The DVDfever Review

For the gadget-obsessed DVD fan in your life, what will he/she want for Christmas this year? A Sony DVP-CX860, that’s what.

And why should you? Well, not only because of its ability to play a DVD with pin-sharp clarity of picture and sound in both Dolby Digital 5.1 (DD5.1) and DTS 5.1 sound formats, the latter sounding the best but appears on less releases due to it taking up more space on the disc and that the former has a wider recognition.

Also, Joe Punter is only just getting his/her head around Dolby Digital and Sky are trialling DD5.1 broadcasts on their movie channels through Sony digiboxes later this year, so DTS will remain alone on DVDs for the time being. More DVDs from other regions, in particular Region 1 (North America), have DTS soundtracks so if you’re going to buy this machine make sure it can be made to play all regions and not just Region 2 (Europe, Japan) which is the default setting.

On the subject of regions, these days you have to ensure the player is “region-selectable”, i.e. that whether it’s done manually or automatically upon insertion of a disc, that the player selects the region individually so it is not tied down to more than one region at any one time. That way you will also defeat RCE-encoded DVDs (Region Code Enhancement), in which if a disc detects that the player is enabled to look after more than one region – and many DVD players will be set to ‘all’ when chipped – then the disc will simply refuse to play. At the moment, RCE is only implemented on Region 1 DVDs.

On an internet search I found the cheapest price for this DVD player to be around £539 remaining on Region 2, but around £569 to cover all regions.

But what’s the most important thing about this fantastic beast? The fact that it plays just a few more than the usual one disc – it plays 301 in total, each with the capacity to hold 9 bookmarks. Not so obsessed that you’ve maxed out your credit card on over 300 DVDs? No problem as it’ll take your collection of regular CDs too.

I initially thought from the name of this DVD player that it held 300 discs in a rotating carousel and one on its own for when you don’t want to flick through the rest, but no doubt to conserve space, they’re all together at just over 1^o apart and a “flip” option ensures that double-sided DVDs get just the same executive treatment as the carousel rotates 180^o before inserting the DVD into the vertical player in the centre, fronted by a captivating glowing green light.

However, where the “+1” comes into play is if you insert the disc at position 301, so just to the left-hand side of the carousel’s divide, and to force the player to jump to that disc, press “Easy Play” on the remote or the unit.

With a weight of around 10kg and dimensions in millimetres of 430(w) x 198(h) x 503(d), it should fit nicely into your A/V setup and will impress your friends as the front draw opens invitingly to add or remove your favourite films and CDs.

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The DVP-CX860. Not as big as you might think.

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Taking a trip around the front fascia of the unit, starting on the right-hand side, we find many of the usual controls you’d expect and the plus is that almost all of these are replicated on the remote exactly, including the rocking cursor control and jog dial for rewinding and fast-forwarding a film. However, one thing unique on the player is a rotating control which works in conjunction with the ‘disc change’ (for selecting a different DVD) and ‘direct search’ for changing chapters within the DVD that you’re watching. Push this in and the selection is confirmed. The alternative way to do this from the remote alone would be to go into the menu and type in the number of another DVD or chapter.

In addition to the ‘Easy Play’ and ‘Flip’ controls is a ‘Mega Control’ button. It’s something I wouldn’t need to use, but for those with an extra Sony CD changer that can hold 5, 50, 200 or 300 CDs, plugging this into back of the DVD player will effectively double the capacity for those musically-minded who find that 301 CD spaces isn’t enough.

If you’ve filled the machine with 301 DVDs though, how on earth are you expected to find them all? With the Disc Browser. DVDs and CDs are already separated into separate categories but you can create four further folders in which to divide up your collection and enter a short title for each disc. Those that make use of “CD Text”, which would enable the name of the disc to show up on the front electronic display, are catered for but for those with nothing you can simply plug your PC keyboard into the PS/2 connection, type in your choice of title and navigate the disc browser structure.

To complete the front is a dimmer switch for the display and a “VES” button, which cycles through a couple of virtual surround sound modes. When I tried these though it made absolutely no difference to the proceedings whatsoever, but that might be down to being overridden by the sound fields created by my Sony STR-DB930 amplifier, of which that contains plenty.

On the subject of sound the DVP-CX860 certainly doesn’t skimp on that score. Test DVDs included Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Seven: Special Edition and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. In T2 the action scenes are numerous, while the highlight of Star Wars was the pod race and the climatic battle.

The picture quality brings out the best in a DVD too. I’ve been used to the top-notch looks delivered by a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM pumped through to a 32″ widescreen Panasonic TV and if there’s any glitches shown up through the DVP-CX860 then it’s down to the disc with mild glitches showing up often in The Phantom Menace and the overall age of Terminator 2: Judgment Day showing when it shouldn’t. The best discs that shone through during the brief time I had with the unit were I’m Alan Partridge – which you’d expect to be first-rate given it being so recent – and Ravenous.

For NTSC DVDs that are region-free or Region 2 (as in many of the UK WWF DVDs), these are shown in pure NTSC given that there’s no on-board NTSC-to-PAL conversion, so hook up with either a SCART or an s-video lead and you’ll be fine.

Note that the rear of the unit contains two SCART sockets, an s-video out – which was my choice – phono video out and component video out sockets, as well as co-axial and optical digital sound outputs and the aforementioned “Mega Control” connection.

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I wanted to know why when using this DVD player does widescreen auto-switching occur on the Region 2 DVDs, Seven SE and Terminator 2, but not The Phantom Menace, Bedazzled and Ravenous, or have only a handful of discs actually got the autoswitching enabled?

Thanks to Andrew Hodgkinson for the following reply:

“It’s a bit complex.

The disc itself contains flags describing the aspect ratio of the coded frame plus the active area within it. For an anamorphic disc this would indicate a 16:9 coded frame and the DVD player itself would, depending on the level of support in its firmware, generate signals on the SCART or S-Video leads and may construct appropriate line 23 (or line 21 for NTSC) signalling to tell your TV what to do.

Meanwhile, the encoded frame on a DVD includes the first half of the first line and the last half of the last line of the visible display. If you look closely at a TV you’ll see that the visible scan actually starts and ends half way along – the first line you see is in fact line 23, but the first half of it is *not* meant to be visible. Thus, a DVD player (and indeed DTV receivers and so-on) should mask out the first half of line 23 decoded from the actual MPEG stream, and possibly write their own information in there as described. Some don’t, though, so if you actually MPEG encode a wide screen signal burnt into the picture in the first half of line 23 you have a fighting chance of it making it to the TV unscathed and the TV then switching accordingly.

This is, of course, very bad. The disc itself should NEVER contain the line 23 signal, because the DVD player may be told to output a 16:9 letterbox image for a 4:3 TV. However the TV may be 16:9 shape or 4:3 with a true 16:9 mode, and an attempt by the disc to override what the player is doing could lead to nasty results, such as a 4:3 or 16:9 letterbox picture being output by the DVD player, with the TV switched into 16:9 anamorphic mode because of burnt-in line 23 signals being “leaked” from the disc. The same sort of argument exists for digital TV receivers since they also can be told what sort of TV you have, but the majority of those (unfortunately) do leak the first part of line 23 as the designers simply did not realise they weren’t meant to…

Quite a few DVDs, by the way, have incorrect encoding flags so you can find some 16:9 anamorphic discs do not switch your TV into the correct mode whilst others do. This can be caused by any number of things, not least including dodgy encoder software or an operator who isn’t as clued up as he/she ought to be. I reckon it was a specific combination of confused flags settings that provoked older versions of the Samsung 709 firmware to display the “anamorphic bug”, where it did a forced downconversion to 16:9 letterbox despite the setup menu being told the TV supported 16:9 anamorphic, BICBW.”

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A closer look at the remote control –>

I was only able to get a picture of the remote which accompanied the DVP-CX850, the 200-disc equivalent of this machine, but there’s little difference, bar a rearrangement of a few keys.

Again, apart from the usual you’d find, there’s the addition of folder keys to replicate that found on the unit, and a “picture memory” function. Press this at any time and it’ll save that image as the screensaver when you first switch on the machine. I had to learn that function pretty quickly as I accidentally made Alan Partridge eating a scotch egg the picture and the breath that stank afterwards… 🙂

Finally – any downsides? Well, those DVD boxes will have to be stored somewhere if you insist on filling the beast, but that’s tough. It’s the price you pay for the luxurious extravagance and damn fine convenience. Also, I could be flippant and say that I cannot take screengrabs as I can with my PC DVD-ROM but that wasn’t what this machine was designed to do, so it’s simple enough to make a note of what you want, then put the disc in your PC and run a program like PowerDVD in which to do the honours.

Seriously though, the jog dial is a pain and I’d add a couple more buttons to take the effort away from moving the dial when instead it’s better and more natural to press a button to shuttle back and forth through a scene.

Also, when it comes to bookmarks, while adding a bookmark is easy peasy, viewing them afterwards isn’t as that option is buried within a couple of sub-menus. Still, when you do view the bookmarks, they are displayed as frames from the film as can the chapters also be seen should that be desired. I’m sure though that any decent universal remote should be able to get round both of these problems quite easily were you to use those as well. Might be a bit of a kludge using more than one remote, but if you’re surrounded by a number reaching double figures as I am then one more won’t matter.

Overall, the Sony DVP-CX860 comes highly recommended by me and I would love one that plays all regions. Add to this the ease of use and excellent clarity of picture and sound and your friends will be mightily impressed.

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OVERALL

10

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