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| NEWS AND COMMENT |
10 / 11 / 04 |
Denon DVD-A1XV with Realta chipBy AVR |  | | |
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Denon had themselves a world first at this year's What Hi-Fi SHow with the debut of the Realta chip, a single-chip video processor which will first appear in the DVD-A1XV next year. A demo featuring the 'HQV' (Hollywood Quality Video) chip, created by US pro video specialists Teranex and Silicon Optix, was admittedly impressive, with a clear difference between pictures which were passed through the Realta and those which were not. In particular the process led to a very noticeable reduction in 'jaggies' and background noise, plus a quite startling increase in detail.
Among the technologies available in the chip are: multi-direction diagonal filter (MDDF), which uses a ten-bit diagonal interpolator to remove jaggies and stair-stepping artefacts without blurring the image; noise adaptive and motion adaptive pixel-by-pixel 4D noise reduction - detail enhancement that improves image detail on a pixel-by-pixel basis for standard definition that approaches high-definition quality.
It also has automatic film cadence processing, which provides support for vari-speed cadences such as 3:2:3:2:2 and others to ensure film and video sources will be seen in the original format without loss of resolution - an industry first. Automatic per-pixel video/film detection makes pixel-level decisions for processing film pixels as film and video pixels as video to avoid the kind of processing artefacts that normally occur in sequences such as titles or credits over film backgrounds, plus true ten-bit processing enables rendering of over 1 billion colours.
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Three levels of processing are available, from low to high, and Teranex claims it has found the preferred processing level to vary among individuals, and also among territories - Japan is very keen on maximum detail, for example, but the US prefers a softer resolution, apparently.
The first device to feature this technology is the outrageously well-specced Denon DVD-A1XV universal player, which can play virtually any disc, including hi-res and photo varieties and features virtually every relevant output, including HDMI, DVI, FireWire, Denon Link, Progressive Component, Composite, S-Video, and RGB SCART.
It's expected to be in the shops early next year with a proposed price of around £2,000.
For more info on the Realta chip, go to www.hqv.com.
For more info on Denon, go to www.denon.co.uk.
What do you think of Denon's new baby? Can a video processing chip really make much of a difference? Have your say in our forum.
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