Really bad review of DVxplore on Advanced Imaging magazine I just got today. pp. 21-22, April 99 issue. Advanced Imaging is a magazine mostly for electronic imaging professionals.
They reviewed 3 chips: Philips, CUBE, and Matsushita & partners. Snippet of CUBE review:
"The DV-xplore, like the Philips MPEG-2 board, has a projected selling price in a retail market at about $300 to $400. In this price range, it is an acceptable product for the general consumer in 1999. But, to put it succinctly, its performance is not....
Results of that "on-site" testing and evaluation of the C-Cube DVxplore system were, frankly, very disappointing. ...
Playback of the very first scene, which had a number of rapidly-chaning transitions, produced a series of frozen "blocks". We had expected to see a few failures of the encoding process, but not so soon. As the recorded clip played on, there were other similar events. C-Cube staff quickly suggested that their computer system must have been "just warming up" and that they'd like to record the tape again.
But that produced the same results, and a closer examination of the viewing screen revealed some other eye-catching results. When the recorded MPEG-2 clip was played, it lost much of its very familiar sharpness and clarity. It appeared as if the system had heavily filtered the input of the test video for results that looked like a standard VHS tape - not what would be expected from a 720x482 DV tape.
This heave filtering might be necessary in order for the DVxplore system to remove unwanted artifacts, but it also removes much of the picture details as well. We'd surely doubt that consumer customers - let alone semipros - would be willing to buy products with output on that level."
Comments? Have there been other independent reviews of the DVxplore output?
-Bill |
