Sony DVP-725
Review written by Chris Till on 26-Aug-1999

The Sony DVP-S725D is undisputably the most awesome DVD player in Australia, it really is. I upgraded from the Panasonic A330MU, which I've had since 1998 and was what I considered to be the best available player at the time - boy has she been made obsolete by this baby!

For starters the menus are simply gorgeous, it's like stepping up from 16 colour graphics to 16 million colours graphics...they are so detailed and extremely easy and nice to use.

Audio Quality
She has a built in Dolby Digital decoder, whoopie do really, but she does pass the DTS bitstream down the fibre optic (or coax if you use that) so my amp can finally decode it! The audio is decoded in 24bit and despite all the hype about Toshiba's having only a mere 0.003% distortion, this baby is at 0.0025%! The audio circuitry on this thing is fully isolated and an r-core transformer is used to keep interference down to practically zilch! There is also numerous audio equilization settings, though these seem targetted more at 2-channel stereo users.

Picture Quality
The picture quality, wow you can configure this directly at the player - full video equilization! You can adjust the sharpness, brightness, colour, etc. and there are preprogrammed settings such as Cinema. People claim the Toshiba's have the sharpest and best picture, well check this Sony out baby she not only has the best picture but you can fine tune it to your hearts content! The video is decoded in 10-bit and also features numerous video noise reduction settings.

Features
Features, man does this baby have some fancy features. For DVDs that have text titles, the Sony can display this on its display. For DVDs that don't have text titles, you can program one into it. You can also, get this, take a screen shot from any scene in a movie and use it as the DVD player's startup screen and/or background screen. Awesome stuff, got a great shot of the Enterprise-E bellowing smoke from its nacelles. You can view a picture of what layer of a dual layer disc you are playing, you can see bit rates, you can even analyse a history of bit rates. You can get it to display a shot from every chapter on the DVD, and believe it or not the baby can even display a screen shot from every title on the disc...I've found plenty of hidden DVD easter eggs using this nifty feature! Even strobe playback enables you to see all the various frames of a scene at the same time, and they animate (though albeit slowly). She can automatically select the best soundtrack on the disc, meaning no more having to s pecify the Dolby Digital track (though I still have to do this for Paramount discs which seem to force the matter) and she can even display different angles at the same time. You can even store individual settings, such as video equilization and sound track and subtitles and bookmarks and so forth for up to 200 individual DVDs...YEAH BABY!!!

General Impressions
This player is very quick, it spins up and responds pretty darned fast. She looks great and is extremely quiet, you can even navigate the menus and so forth from the DVD player itself (all other players force you to use the remote). There's even a jog dial, on both the player itself AND the remote!

And best of all this baby even has component outputs!!!

Region-Mod
I've had mine fitted with a PREMIUM mod from the DVD Shop, which not only gives me the automatic region selection I was accustomed to with my former Panny but I can manually specify the region as well (in case some form of protection causes the automatic selection to not work). The PREMIUM mod also knocks out the macrovision and best of all it prevent titles from locking out controls - for example I can now skip past those frustrating Paramount copyright messages that you can't get rid of as well as change the audio on the fly (Paramount discs lock such controls out). The service menu on the player itself has a colour bar, quite useful for calibrating your television!

An absolutely awesome machine, awesome!!!

The BAD news...
But it does have a couple of negatives. The joystick on the remote sucks, it really does. Too sensitive, and when you click boy does it make a CLICK sound. I miss my Panasonic joystick, that was cool. A lot of the buttons on the remote glow in the dark, though not as well as the ones on my amp, but still nifty. The remote also allows you to control your TV and the VOLUME ONLY on your amp. Had the remote also allowed me to turn on the amp and specify DVD input, then I could have now done away with all my remotes as the Sony is quite nice. Bugger!

I also seem to notice small amounts of MPEG artifacts, more so when video equilization is in use. I never had this on my Panny, or at least couldn't see it, so either the video equilization takes up CPU time on this unit or it is simply showing up detail (which it certainly does) that my Panny did not.

The player also gives you a lot of very user friendly messages such as "The movie has been halted by pushing stop but you will be able to resume exactly where you left off" or stuff to that degree. Very good for beginners, but for me...it's pissing me off!!!! Need an option to get rid of them!!!

The player also seems to forget the custom video eq. settings I make after power off, though I have a feeling that may be a quirk caused by the mod. Instead I use one of the pre-programmed ones.

Lip Synch?
Finally the dreaded lip-sync issue, which I had never faced before. I've seen it once, only once, on Deep Impact. I had been jumping around chapters something chronic testing the unit out, backwards and forwards, and at one point when I started playing it was fully out of sync by over a second!!! VERY NOTICABLE. But after stopping and starting it again I've never had it since, can't reproduce it either.

With the way some of the features work, and the type and variety of information it stores for individual discs, I have no doubt that this firmware seems to be heading towards some kind of future 100disc or 200disc player! Imagine that baby sitting there on top of my 110disc CD player, YEAH BABY!!!

Conclusion
Over all, this is by far and undisputably THE best DVD player in Australia - it really is. This baby is so awesome, and comes complete with five free DVD rental vouchers for Video Ezy!!!

My partner's opinion? I liked the silver colour of the old one! And get rid of that Star Trek background!