My piece of crap Denon carousel DVD player is on the fritz - has been for a year or so. It doesn't always recognize the disc that it should play, it just says "loading" indefinitely. Unplugging it for a while used to solve the problem, but even that's not working anymore.
Anyways, has anybody heard any pos/neg things about the Sony DVD mega-changer? In particular, I am concerned about the video performance of the unit. How widely does the video performance of different DVD players vary anyway?
Thanks in advance for your thoughtful responses.

bigwill I have a sony 300 disc unit that was discontinued for the 400 disc units with SACD. It has been a good performer. I bought it because of the good specs on both video and audio. Sony has a new model 400 disc unit coming out this month http://www.1888camcorder.com/dvpcx995v.html It looks to be based on the current sony dvpcx-985v but with updated functionality video processing and HDMI output. These also play SACD.

What Denon do you have? Have you tried Denon servce? I had to replace the chucking device in my dvd player. Now perfect.

hey man, i have a 400 disk sony mega changer... its the dvd one, and the picture quality is great.. i have not noticed any problems at all, im using component video out to my projector.. and the picture is wonderful...

Hi bigwill,

Wow, this is too easy!

Just re-read dakkons comments!!(Except change "projector" to "65 mits")

I would like to add that in the past I had read that the Disc Explorer was a bit slow and clunky and that even machine start-up was a long and tedious affair; software problems I believe. They musta changed something-no problems or delays.

By the way, it was my wife who wanted it, and is the one who normally uses it. And while she is more than happy with the way our system sounds and looks, She has little or no interest in the nuts and bolts of the thing. I was leaning toward the ES version, which happens to have a silver finish, but she thought the less expensive version in black would look better with the receiver and speakers(which are also in black)so we bought the DVP-CX985V model with an extended warranty to equal the 5 year warranty on the ES model.

But guess what?

No Complaints at all! It's really quite intuitive. (By the way, I still had to do the set-up, but it's an easy task)

As far as picture quality, I can't say that it's quite as good as HD, but it sure is a heck of a lot better than any of my other DVD players on 480i that had only composite out. I don't have any other current generation players to compare it to, but sitting here in my house, in my system, I have absolutely no complaints with either player operation or picture quality.

I'm running it directly to the TV rather than through the receiver cause the TV supports it, and I didn't want anything else in the signal path that might muck up a really good picture. And a really good picture it is!

And yes, this Sony also supports SACD but I still haven't gotten around to that yet, although I'm looking foreward to giving it a shot.

Would I recommend it? Hey, would I recommend Axiom?

Yeah! in my opinion, its a good deal all the way arpund!
Rich.

Thanks guys.
That player you mentioned is the one I'm eyeing. I found it online at OneCall for $300 delivered. Sounds pretty damn good - I'll daisy chain it with my existing 300 disc player and fill 'er up!
I assumed it was a progressive scan player, but I will go verify immediately.

I decided to hold off until this weekend when I can measure the space where the DVD player might go (it's pretty deep, y'know).
Kind of off topic, but when I was going through my 300 disc changer to select songs for my CD mix y'all received, I happen to notice that the title I had input for one CD - Albert King with Freddie King - semed a little odd. The mega changer allows a limited number of characters in the window so I abbreviated the title of this disc to "AKING&FKING". Sounds more like a DVD title doesn't it?