Home Theater Magazine reviews the NeuNeo HVD2085 upconverting DVD player.

The Good

This player’s claim to fame is that it upconverts all DVD’s to 1080p via both the HDMI and component outputs. I don’t know how they got around the legal ramifications, but it seems like they did. Either that or this player will be pulled off the market. As far as I knew, manufacturers were only allowed to upconvert to HD on the copy-protected HDMI output. Not only that, but this DVD player is region free and the HDMI output doesn’t pass HDCP. Which means there’s no copy protection on it.

How’s that for consumer rights?

The palette of available output resolutions is amazing: 480i, 480p, VGA, 576p, SVGA, 720p, XGA, SXGA, 1080i, 1080p. And that’s on both the HDMI and component outputs.

The Bad

Too good to be true? Well, kinda, yeah:

The HVD2085 does have a rather significant Achilles heel. For some inexplicable reason, it doesn’t have 3:2 pulldown detection on 720p or 1080p, but it does have it for 480p. I was so dumbfounded by this oversight that I checked and rechecked with every piece of test material I could put my hands on. Take, for example, the end of chapter 12 of Gladiator, our normal test scene. Little jagged edges were visible on the stairs, the roof tops, and the Coliseum itself. This was the case with most material. The jaggies weren’t as bad as most players that don’t do 3:2, but they were still there. When there was an angle that was, say 25 degrees or less, it would have small jaggies. With an otherwise amazing DVD player, this oversight was extremely depressing. Video processing was also only OK, with small jaggies on the flag sequence on the Silicon Optix HQV Benchmark DVD. For those with 720p or 1080p TVs, this lack of 3:2 is probably a deal breaker. For those with 1080i TVs (and there are plenty of you out there), this isn’t an issue (you don’t need 3:2 pulldown with interlace).

So even though this player can upconvert to 720p and 1080p, it’s picture quality in those modes isn’t that good. Doh!

The Conclusion

So this is a majorly cool DVD player with a majorly bad problem. Outside of that problem, of course, there is also Hollywood, which you know is going to object to this player. We’ll have to wait and see how that resolves itself.

Home Theater: NeuNeo HVD2085 1080p Upconverting DVD Player