In reply to:
The Toshiba has a severe Chroma problem and has trouble passing blacker then black.
Here's where I switch sides.
DVD players *gasp* do make differences in their video output. Good reason for this - video processing.
Since version 1.00001 of everyone's DVD-P, they've been adding video processing circuitry, why? DVD video stinks on ice, search the forums for any of my rants on this previously. The unadultered video on DVD discs suffers from crawling blacks - you can usually see banding in close black gradients - the MPEG macroblock compression used doesn't deal with it well and you end up seeing what look like puzzle pieces changing shape in the dark areas of the screen. Again, I'm sensitive to digital aliasing in audio and video, because I've used it so long. So how did they fix this problem? They use black clamping, crushing a range of blacks down to pure black. This does get rid of the crawlies, but it also crushes the luminance channel. Throw the output of a DVD-P into a waveform monitor and you'll see there is either no detail between, say 7.5IRE and 11 IRE or that there is an extraordinary amount at 7.5IRE and the rest of the range has been expanded to fill the gap (throwing off the video gamma).
Add to that the difference in video amp circuits, internal shielding, etc, etc and you can see how different DVD players can produce different results.
Whereas you want a CD-P to pass exactly what's on a CD to the receiver, you WANT a DVD-P to do something to the video to make it more eye-friendly.
Bren R.
