Digital Trends

Pioneer ships the DV-490V with the basic necessities to get things going. This includes RCA cables, remote control, batteries and the owner’s manual. If you plan to connect this to your TV using component video expect to pay around 50 dollars, and upwards of 100 dollars for a decent length HDMI cable. Samsung has traditionally included an HDMI with their up-converting DVD players, albeit a cheap one, but at least it’s ready to go out of the box.

 

For our tests we used an HDMI cable by Monster Cable and hooked the DV-490V up to a new Philips 42PF9831D 42” LCD TV (which has two HDMI inputs) and an Onkyo 701TX receiver (which does not include HDMI).  The first thing we noticed about the Pioneer DV-490V is that it uses Pioneer’s standard generic remote control which has basically been the same for the past few years. It has no backlight or styling for that matter, but it get’s the job done.

 

The setup menu is very easy to navigate so you can get things setup to meet your needs. You can easily access the menu from either the remote control or via the controls on the front of the unit itself. One thing worth noting that is that because there is no LED indicator on the front of the player, you have no idea whether the unit is turned on or off until the display actually says “Pioneer” across it, and startup time is about 10-15 seconds. So if you have the Pioneer DV-490V plugged into the wrong connection on your TV, then it’s a guessing game for the first 10 seconds. The last time we checked an LED costs somewhere around .00000000005 of a cent – so Pioneer is just being cheap here.

 

We found the picture quality to be fairly good. Colors are accurately reproduced for the most part, but we found some jaggy edges on certain content when looking closely. We thought the image quality on the Oppo Digital OPDV97H looked better, thanks to the Faroudja chip that it uses. Text looked solid both while scrolling and during subtitles. One thing worth noting is that the Philips 42PF9831D we used during testing kept changing screen modes, from stretched 4:3 to Widescreen when in “auto” mode. For some reason the DV-490V kept throwing the set off, but that is something we will need to test once we review the Philips TV. When we tested the DV-490V on a 42” inch Hitachi 42HTD51 plasma using the same HDMI connection, we did not experience this issue. DivX movies played back without a hitch as should be expected. Sometimes we noticed the high-definition up-conversion, and sometimes we did not – it all depended on the scene.

 

 

Probably one of the most overlooked features on today’s DVD player is the picture playback capabilities. There is little reason to spend money on a Media Center PC if all you want to do is show some pictures to your friends. One of the biggest problems we have seen with DVD players however is the speed it takes to go from one picture to the next. LG’s LRY-517 combo VCR/DVD player for example, would take 10-15 seconds to change from one picture to the next due to its slow processor. The DV-490V on the other hand showed pictures with excellent speed. You can either watch a slideshow of your pictures, or browse through the thumbnails while in the top level menu.

 

 

 

Another overlooked feature on a lot of DVD players is their music capabilities. While the DV-490V does not support DVD-Audio or SACD discs, it'll playback music encoded in WMA or MP3 formats. We did not experience any playback issues whatsoever. While the song is playing, the player will display the song title, artist and bit-rate grabbing the information from the files tag information. Because the DV-490V supports both CD and DVD media, you can store literally thousands of songs and play them with this player – it’s great for parties. The best part is that you can play a song and show a slideshow at the same time. These are pretty basic features nowadays that companies tend to screw up. Thankfully the DV-490V gets them right.

 
Browsing the MP3 directory will display the album and artist information including the bit-rate