Digital Trends

 

The Pioneer DV-490V is a fairly attractive unit and since it’s available in either black (the K model) or silver, it should blend in quite well with your current home theater setup. The unit measures just a tad over 1 inch tall and 8 inches deep – a lot smaller than the DVD players of five years ago. On the front of the unit you have your typical controls which include rewind/fast forward/stop/ play/pause/open and close/ and menu navigation buttons. What’s missing however is an LED that lets you know when the unit is powered up. Instead there is an LED that lets you know when the HDMI connector is being used (and we expect a small percentage of users actually use HDMI on this player). On the back of the Pioneer DV-490V you have RCA, Component Video, HDMI, S-Video and Coaxial Digital Audio outputs. What’s odd is that Pioneer is using Coaxial Digital Audio out rather than Optical Digital Out which the more common of the two.

 

Like most DVD players today, the Pioneer DV-490V is compatible with most media out there including DVDs, DVD-R/RW, CDs, CD-R/RW, WMA and MP3 audio types – it will even playback movies encoded in DiVX. If you are the type that likes to show off pictures, the Pioneer DV-490V has a built-in PhotoViewer that supports JPEG pictures.

 

The Pioneer DV-490V has onboard encoders for Dolby Digital and DTS including a 24-bit/96kHz audio converter. It does not however have an onboard encoder for Dolby Digital Plus or DTS-HD and for good reason – this is a budget DVD player, it does not support Blu-Ray!

 

When it comes to video, the Pioneer DV-490V does have a few tricks up its sleeves however. Using the MediaTek MPEG decoder, the 490V will up-convert non copy-protected DVDs to either 720P or 1080i depending on your preferences. For those of you that might be a tad bit confused, this means that essentially any store bought DVD will playback in good ole 480i or 480p mode, it will not up-convert to HD resolutions for you. However, if you have a DivX movie snagged from the web, or some home videos, then it will show them in the higher resolutions.

 

 
Pioneer DV-490V