Until today the Sony PlayStation 3 had been arguably the most powerful Blu-ray player on the market and one of the cheapest, retailing for $400 USD for its smallest capacity model.
The new Elite however should blow the PS3's specs out of the water, although at $1800 more. The Elite is full BD-Live capable and comes with built-in 4GB internal memory for some of your downloading needs.
The player is not however, the sleekest Blu-ray player you've ever seen. It weighs almost 50 pounds and is much taller than an average player. It is however, very well built. Completely made of steel and aluminum the player is mounted to avoid any vibration. There are also no wires inside the player, all the connections have been physically mounted from the circuit board to greatly reduce noise.
Pioneer adds that this all-in-one box should be able to replace even a high-end snob's CD player, DVD player and current Blu-ray player.
From an audio standpoint, Pioneer says this will decode all your music and movie soundtracks using gold-plated 7.1 RCA jacks that also create a "completely perfect noise-free signal." All known codecs are decoded using a separate digital-to-analog converter for each channel which is an interesting feature that should make playback excellent. The company also promises jitter-free disc playback.
For video playback, 1080p/24 is available for both Blu-ray and DVD and the image processor is the best on the market, the processor found in 10-megapixel projectors.
The most notable feature however is that color is upconverted to 16 bits, meaning that each picture can have up to 2,800 trillion colors, a number completely unheard of until now. Although Blu-ray outputs 8-bit colors and most TVs can only handle 10-bit, Pioneer correctly says that it is much better to send richer signals and have the TV tone it down than have the TV upscale the Blu-ray data. Also, when TVs move to 16-bit color, you will be there.
Another notable feature is two HDMI out ports which allows users to use one for audio and the other for video, saving bandwidth on each.
Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 25 Aug 2008 11:32
