Sony DVP-NS975V Up-Scaling DVD/CD/SACD Player
Extra Star Given for Balance
I'm not sure where all the angst came from in the negative reviews here.  I've had this long enough to know that we got a good unit.  The main reason I'm posting a review is to make a couple of comments about the upscaling capability of this unit.  First off, the upscaling logic will NOT make a lousy DVD look as good as your favorites.  The good news is that it does provide quite a bit of improvement on some discs and you don't even have to have the best TV monitor to see the improvement.  Before replacing our 11+ year-old Toshiba 32\\" TV, we had plenty of time to verify this claim.  We also had two other DVD players to compare to, both decent players by Panasonic and Pioneer, both without upsampling capability.  One improvement you will notice is significant softening of noise features.  DVDs that I classify as \\"bad\\" often display increased image distortion as the subjects within the frame move faster.  The upsampling capability tends to make these artifacts less noticeable.<br /><br />Another comment about video quality - I've asked myself and heard others ask if HDMI cables are worth the money.  Our TV has HDMI inputs as well as component video inputs.  There is no doubt that the HDMI input provides for better picture quality.  Since this DVD player has both HDMI and component outputs, it's easy enough to switch the TV input to compare.  And if you shop around, you can now get HDMI cables at a much more reasonable price than you could a few months ago.  I've compared $250 Audioquest cables to $60 AR cables using this DVD player and a 1080i standard monitor and am hard pressed to say that I can see any difference.  However, the Audioquest cable does seem to keep a good connection longer than the AR.  More expensive HDMI cables are more supple and seem to handle being bent around in the cable quagmire much better than cheaper ones.