This review is now outdated. Since I'm now a hardware reviewer for DVD Times, a cleaned-up and revised version of this review is available at that site.

The following review is left here for completeness only.

Picture Tweaks

Pressing the HOME MENU button on the remote or on the front of the player brings up the familiar Pioneer main menu.

Although Video Adjust is what we're mainly concerned with, the "Initial Settings" menu is home to the HDMI Output options. The options here let you choose 1080i upscaled video, 720p upscaled video, 480p/576p Deinterlaced, non-scaled video, or 480i/576i interlaced, standard-def video (yes, this players' HDMI output can send 480i and 576i). Note that the option in the player's menu changes to reflect the last disc you had in - 480 for NTSC, 576 for PAL.

You can also choose the HDMI Colour setting - RGB, Full range RGB, or Component. I have no idea if the Component output is 4:4:4 or 4:2:2.

Although 1080i video looked good - far, far better than the pixellated look of my older Panasonic DVD-S97, I chose 720p video in the end.

Now for the Video Adjust menu. I don't feel many of the options here need significant explanation because most of them are the same as the options you're familiar with on your TV. Chroma Level, to my eyes, is simply a saturation/colour adjustment. Interestingly, setting "Gamma" to High will make the picture Darker, with off being the lightest setting. My other player works the other way around - which is technically correct, I'm not sure.

Sharpness is probably the most important option here. It works very differently on the Component video output compared to how it works on the HDMI output. There is very little difference between the settings on HDMI; "Standard" and "Soft" seemed to act like very, very subtle filters with Fine giving what to me looked like the most detail. On Component Video, Standard was the best setting because Fine was significantly edge enhanced (helped along a little by my TV) and Soft had excessive vertical blurring.

My previous Panasonic S97 gave control of numerical values for all of the video controls (including Sharpness). I found this VERY useful for connecting to my TV, which sadly adds a bit of edge enhancement to Standard Definition video. It meant that I could sidestep the TV's problem and get a nice, natural picture over Component. I'd really appreciate more control for the Sharpness here instead of just 3 pre-defined settings.

Interestingly, this player does not output S-Video at all. There is no S-Video output on the back and Y/C video can't be passed over the SCART connetion. This might be an issue for people with older AV receivers, but that said, it's unlikely people with older receivers would want an upscaling player in the first place and S-Video, especially in Europe, is an increasingly redundant video signal format. Irritatingly, setting the SCART output to RGB completely blanks the video from the Component jacks, rather than just setting it to black and white. This meant that when I selected it by accident, I had to connect a different video cable in order to be able to use the player again.

As an added bonus, the DV-490V does output video over HDMI as well as Progressive via Component at the same time. If you have a setup that requires, for example, a projector to be fed via Component and a TV to be fed via HDMI, this would be very useful.

Next page >>

On the next page, I test drive the DV-490V with DVDs with various different types of video.

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