While the big consumer electronics brands rush to align themselves with either Blu-ray or HD DVD, Denon stands with the other hi-fi specialists, refining the format that revolutionised the home cinema industry, with ever more sophisticated upscaling DVD players.
The most affordable of the new line up is this, the DVD-1930. It fills the awkward mid-price slot and justifies its ‘step-up' price-tag with a range of features that you won't find on a budget machine. For starters, this is a ‘universal' player, which means compatibility with both Super Audio CD and DVD Audio. At the other end of the quality scale, it can also play MP3 and WMA music files, while DivX movies and JPEGs are also supported.
The DVD-1930's party trick though, is its ability to upscale standard-definition DVDs to Full HD 1080p – the same resolution as Blu-ray. The difference here is that the additional horizontal lines are invented by a Faroudja scaler.
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Given that all flatpanel displays scale and deinterlace an image to the native resolution of their panel anyway, you have to wonder if a budget player like this can do a better job of it, is that 1080p sticker actually a red herring? Let's find out...
Design and features
First impressions of the DVD-1930 are mixed. The unit is so light (2.6kg), we had to open it up to make sure there was anything inside at all. On the other hand, the few components that make up this DVD player are immaculately assembled with separate circuit boards for analogue and digital audio and another for video. The video processor is the latest Faroudja DCDi FLI-2301 chipset and the digital audio converters are by Analogue Devices. The chassis is braced to reduce vibration; while the aluminium front panel is machined to match Denon's other components.
