Denon's DVD-1800BD Blu-ray player arrives in December for £600
We've just received more details about the 'baby' of Denon's new Blu-ray family, the £600 DVD-1800BD, which joins the DVD-2500BT and DVD-3800BD models.
The DVD-1800BD is intended to offer top-notch audio and video performance at a more affordable price than its siblings, although it's still definitely mid-price in the context of the rest of the Blu-ray market.
For the money you get full bitstream output of Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio formats, as well as 1080p upscaling of DVDs, support for Deep Colour via HDMI 1.3a and Bonus View capability.
What's more, the DVD-1800BD will convert multichannel bitstream HD audio to six channel PCM and pass it via HDMI to AV amps without HD audio decoding. But like Denon's other Blu-ray models it's Profile 1.1, not 2.0, although a firmware upgrade will be available via disc.
For those who plan to use the player as a step-up CD player, the unit has a dedicated stereo analogue output equipped with Burr-Brown digital-to-analogue converters and high-quality analogue components.
The new player also has an SD card reader for viewing other digital media, and incorporates a secondary audio and video decoder to allow simultaneous playback of a separate audio and video track, such as a commentary or picture-in-picture facility.
The Denon DVD-1800BD will be available in silver and black from December.
Comments
Thinking about the lack of 2.0, even more puzzling is that this player has DTS-HD Master decoding but so many recent high-profile models have not or will upgrade at a later stage, why is this?
I have 2 queries
1: are blu-Ray players Region 0 (or even hackable) for DVDs as I have quite a few non-region 2 DVDs that I would still like to play?
2: are Arcam planning to join the Hi-Def world anytime soon?
Andrew H
Good question. I think it's partially because there's very little Live BD content available at the moment, and so some manufacturers don't see it as that important, and also I suspect because there's a certain timelag between product development and new models coming to market.
Why are so many 'soon to be released' models not Profile 2.0 (including this, Yamaha and Sony) when Panasonic blu-ray (out now) has it built in? Is it due to the chipsets they are using?
The Blu-ray player market is definately getting more interesting for me now!
mmmmmmm this sounds like what the nad should be...it has 6.1 anolougue outputs for non hdmi recievers and is 25% cheeper than nad t587...sounds good as i dont need to up grade the denon 2106 reciver..(still dont understand why nad omitted 6.1 anoloogue outputs, at 800 pounds they should have been there)