New Blu-ray player Denon DVD-3800BDCI reviewed by Nicholas Bullock

November 19, 2008

I purchased a Denon DVD-3800BDCI, and PS3. In the 10 days that I've had this player, it's done a excellent job on video and audio quality. I'm running it on a 37" Vizio connected through HDMI. I've never had any of the stutters or other audio/video glitches that others have mentioned. The picture quality is great and the upconversion quality is superb. The BR players are all updatable so it's possible to play the latest movies. However, this player has a VERY bad failure mode and upgrade procedure. This likely makes this required operation out of reach for most people on this device.

Other nice features of this player include variety of media: You can play not only standard music CDs (a given) but also MP3 discs. For those who wonder if it will play homemade Blu-Ray DVDs I can report that I have sucessfully created a Blu-Ray DVD with menus on a 25G Single Layer BD-RE (Rewritable) disk using the LG GGW-H20L burner. One drawback that keeps this unit from being perfect is no ethernet connectability for firmware upgrading. It is my opinion that this player was released prematurely based on its feature set. This player did a great job on the Bluray compatibility & picture quality and the DVD upconversion quality. This player is good as far as disks that work on it but it does not support 48kHz/24-bit HD true sound that some blu-ray disks come with. The sound will pop out of sync with the visual. Before you buy call the manufacturer and ask if they have solved this problem by issuing a firmware (disk to put in the machine to update the harddrive) or not.

Upconversion on this player is mediocre, which is very important if you have vast library of DVDs. I figured instead of spending $100 or so on upconvert DVD player to work with my new TV, I decided to go directly to Blu-Ray, since the Blu-Ray is now standard of HD DVDs. The upconversion is wonderful! Best part is I can use optical and take advantage of the new audio codecs. Overall, I found this player to be competent Blu-ray player and a great upconverting DVD player.

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