Tech Bitch

The home theatre environment has certainly come a long way over the past 60 years. Back then, the typical home theatre experience involved the entire family huddled around a black and white analogue set in the living room, watching the same TV programme as every other person in the country. It certainly is an archaic concept to most of us nowadays when, thanks to recent technological advancements, we can enthusiastically devour cinema theatre-quality experiences in the comfort of our own private spaces.

The advent of HD technology has resulted in HD TVs becoming a feature of our domestic spaces. Some 15 per cent of homes in the US already have a HDTV, with numbers growing steadily both there and here in the UK. As the insatiable appetite for the HD experience grows, the consumer market is expanding from niche to mainstream. But misconceptions surrounding the technology and capabilities of the product still abound.

The Helios H4000HD (£65) reviewed here won’t win any design awards - plus it’s build quality is pretty shocking - but it’s a relatively feature-packed upscaling DVD player for those on a budget. The slimline (1.5kg) black player has a very appealing feature too - it can upscale standard DVDs to as high as 1080p resolution through component or HDMI. The player also has the capacity to upscale to 1080i resolution via HDMI output, and 1280×1024-pixel resolution via VGA output.

To cater to Helio’s (once NeoDigits) growing European market, the player also supports 480i and 576i resolutions. With 11 different resolutions to choose from, you have an even greater chance of getting the right match with your high-definition television for quality images with smoother and more pronounced details. What more, the player is region-free out-of-the-box. This means that it can play all your DVDs regardless of which part of the world you copied bought them.

The Helios H4000HD has upgraded power and audio capacitors, and better high-quality components than the older HVD2085 . The player now comes with a full-featured illuminated remote control with a newly-designed easy-to-use layout, a far greater range capacity, and a UOP-off function which lets you bypass all those annoying trailers and copyright notices.

To reap all the benefits of your HDTV’s promise, you need to understand what resolution to choose from the DVD player that is best suited to your LCD TV. For instance, will 1080p work on your TV? Do you know how to get the best high definition resolution from your TV? One common mistake is to wrongly interpret HDTV specifications - your TV may support 720p and 1080p high definition video input, but that doesn’t mean your HDTV will support 720p and 1080p resolutions. The truth is, very few HDTV screens have a ‘native’ resolution that can match 1080p.

The thing to note is that each LCD, plasma and DLP TV has its own native resolution. You must first find out what the native resolution of your TV is. Older-generation plasma TV screens, for example, only have a resolution of 852×480 pixels, while the new generation plasma TV screens have a higher resolution of 1024×1024 pixels. If you don’t have a HD DVD player, or other form of HD video source, the video output will be scaled to match your HDTV display resolution. This could make it look bad, as the video source will output a resolution signal that is different to the HDTV’s native resolution.

When content from a video source, such as a DVD player, is output to a scaler (processing chipset that upscales or downscales the received video signal to match the native resolution of the HDTV’s screen), the original digital format is decoded first by the player, then sent in an analogue format that can be read by the scaler. With that already decoded information, the scaler ‘upscales’ or ‘downscales’ the signal and then outputs it to the HDTV, based on the screen’s resolution.

While many HDTVs now on the market claim to support 1080i resolution (and the most expensive 1080p), you will not be able to play your DVD titles in 1080i resolution on these TVs. The key to getting the best images possible out of your HDTV is to choose the right video source - one that can output the exact same digital signal as the resolution of your HDTV’s screen, direct from the video source into the HDTV, bypassing the ‘scaler’.

Skipping the scaler step is one way of getting a sharper, crisper image from your HDTV. By removing this one step, the digital video signal, in its original format, is sent directly from your video source into your HDTV. DVD players that are able to do so are those equipped with HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface). It is this HDMI feature that takes advantage of a DVD player’s ability to upscale or downscale the DVD title according to the HDTV’s native resolution.

HDMI is the new standard for ‘pure digital’ connection, and was designed as a common interface for devices from set-top boxes to digital TVs. Currently, HDMI offers the best video quality on the market - far better than if an analogue scaler were used to process the signal.

Thus, the key to getting the most out of your HDTV is finding out your display panel’s native resolution, then matching your video source’s HDMI output to this specific resolution. DVD players with the HDMI function, such as the H4000HD, allow you to choose from a number of resolutions for matching purposes. Not all DVD players on the market, however, offer a wide range of choices. So if the native resolution of your particular screen is not available from the list of choices on the DVD player, the best thing to do is opt for the next nearest resolution, whether it is slightly higher of lower, and then test by trial and error to see which of the two images appears sharper.

The H4000HD offers no less than 11 output options. Indeed, owners of DVD players that offer a large choice such as this, have a higher chance of getting the right match for their HDTVs, and are able to reap the benefits from a larger pool of HDTVs available, no matter what the brand, model or resolution.

The player supports pretty much every type of format including DVD, SVCD, VCD, CD, HDCD, MP3, WMA, Photo-CD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW and DVD-RW. It upscales standard DVD titles up to 1080p via component or HDMi connectors, and also supports 720p, 1080i, 480i and 576i output options. Output options via the VGA interface include 640×480, 800×600, 10247×68 and 1280×1024 pixels. It also has a built-in Dolby 5.1 and DTS decoder, as well as a 16-bit 149MHz Video DAC and 192kHz 24-bit Audio DAC (32-bit/133MHz Audio DSP). Connectors are plentiful and comprise component, S-Video, VGA, HDMI and composite video output. There’s also optical, coaxial (S/PDIF) and RCA audio outputs.

I tested the player on a Sharp Aquous HDTV running at a resolution of 1080p and the picture looked really good (I also tried 720p and was equally impressed). Compared to a regular (say 480p) player the detail levels were noticeably increased, as was general brightness. Even lesser DVD Movies looked better, with the exception of a few titles which showed up their inadequacies more predominantly. You’re not getting true HD, but the Helios H4000HD is a reasonable player for DVD buffs who want to get the most from their HDTV without spending hundreds on a ‘true HD’ DVD player.

The major criticism I had with the player was its build quality - the buttons on the unit itself are very noisy when clicked, DVDs frequently stuck (requiring me to force open the drive bay), and the remote control looks like an afterthought. Plus, the on-screen menu is painfully slow and subtitles keep appearing every time you pause a movie - how annoying! But, for the price it’s a steal. [6]