Review on 📀 Samsung DVD-C631P: A Top-Notch 5-Disc Progressive-Scan DVD Player by Terry Brendemuehl

I do have an HDTV capable TV (one of the Sony 1080i models) and can comment on the video quality of this player. My old Pioneer progressive scan player broke, this one was cheap and I think it will probably be a good choice. My TV accepts 480p signals and automatically converts 480p signals with anamorphic compression. My biggest criticism of this player is that it doesn't properly output an anamorphically compressed 480p signal. What is anamorphic compression anyway? As you may have noticed, HDTVs are wider; They have a 16:9 aspect ratio instead of a 4:3 aspect ratio. When you view a 16:9 picture on a 4:3 TV, it will be displayed as "letterbox", which means black bars appear at the top and bottom of the screen. DVDs are encoded with 480 vertical lines of information. Ideally you want to use all 480 lines for the image, not the black boxes. Anamorphic compression solves this problem: it stretches the letterbox image to a 4:3 screen aspect ratio, which sharpens the signal by about 33%. In particular, this means that your DVD player outputs the video signal with all 480 lines of resolution and your television compresses it to the desired size on the screen. The problem with this player is that it doesn't properly output an anamorphic compressed widescreen signal. . With some discs (like the Matrix) I couldn't get the player to properly output the anamorphic compressed widescreen signal to my TV. So I had to resort to letterboxing the image and lost 33% of the resolution in the process. This causes a bigger difference in picture quality than the difference between progressive and interlaced signal. So, in my opinion, this is a useless player for serious videophiles. Together with the useless switching mechanism (see other reviews) I cannot recommend this player.