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The Philips DVD840 digital video disc player has a host of technical features but it does not look much different from a typical VCR. Review: Philips Digital Video Disc (DVD) Player While there has been a great deal of talk about digital video discs (DVDs) in the media over the last few years, it is only now that players and program discs are becoming available. We recently had a look at the Philips DVD player and concluded that it was incredible technology. But it may not set the world on fire as a consumer product. By LEO SIMPSON That’s the problem with technology these days. While it surges forward relentlessly, consumers don’t necessarily grab onto something because it is the latest and greatest. There are a number of products where this has occurred or where they are yet to boom as consumer items: mini-disc, 4  Silicon Chip DCC, DAT, CD-I players and digital still cameras are a few examples. We’ll come to why we think that DVD players as a class might also fall into this category but first let’s look at the Philips DVD-840. As we understand it, this Philips model incorpo­rates most, if not all the stand- ard features of present DVD players. It will play the new digital video discs, standard audio compact discs (CD) and video CD discs. DVDs employ a new dual-layer technology and this allows double the digital storage of normal CDs. As well, the rate at which the data can be accessed off the disc is much faster than typical CD-ROM drives and this means that the system can give full motion video to the latest MPEG2 compression standard. By contrast, normal single layer video CDs use MPEG1 and so the picture definition is noticeably poorer. The first surprise with the Philips DVD player is that it is so light. It is about the same size as a typical VCR, measur­ing 430mm wide, 81mm high and 308mm deep but it only weighs 4kg. Even without turning the machine on, that tells you two things. First, the designers have not needed to resort to massive rigid mechanisms in order to obtain the high data retrieval required. Second, they have been able to use very high levels of large-scale integration. In ordinary language, that means that they have crammed all the functions into just a few circuit boards and that means that a big power supply is not called for. In fact, a glance inside the case shows that while there is not a lot of componentry inside, there is a huge amount of cir­ cuitry, although that might seem like a contradiction in terms. There is the player mechanism itself which looks like any CD or CDROM transport mechanism, a power supply board and a board to terminate all the RCA output connectors. As well, there is the main board which is in a shielded case and the boards for the front panel display, infrared remote and interface functions. These latter two boards are absolutely teeming with surface mount components so while there do not seem to be many LSI packages, there is clearly a great deal of circuitry involved. When you see all those tiny surface mount ICs and other parts tightly packed on the PC boards, you have to admit that this is amazing technology. The developers of the CD (Phil­ips & Sony) have learnt well in the decade or so since CDs were first introduced. Much of that learning has come about because of the wide-scale adoption of CD-ROM drives into computers. Before we leave the interior of the machine, not only is the power supply quite small but it is evidently a switchmode type as well, even though the rated power consumption is only 17W. So instead of the modestly sized conventional power trans­former that you might expect to see inside a VCR or typical piece of audio equipment, this has a bridge rectifier running off the 240VAC mains supply and feeding a 100µF 450VW reservoir capaci­tor. After that there is a tiny little switchmode transformer – no wonder this unit is so light. By the way, when the unit is in standby mode, its power consumption is a mere 4W. Front panel Apart from its size and mass, there is little in the ap­ pearance of the Philips DVD player that screams out picture quality of which the player is capable, you need direct video connections instead of going via the antenna input on your TV set. They’d be right, of course, but there must be millions of consumers out there for whom this will be a major obstacle. For video output signals, the rear panel of the DVD840 features an RCA type video socket together with an S-video sock­et. On the audio side, there are RCA sockets for two pairs of analog stereo outputs and an AC-3 digital output. The digital output can be connected to an AC-3 decoder to obtain full sur­round sound for a home theatre setup. Regional code The remote control features a Jog/ Shuttle control for frame-by-frame slow motion. that this is brand-new technology; quite the opposite in fact. If you look closely, you will recognise the CD drawer and buttons for Play, Pause and Stop. There is a headphone socket and its level control on the lefthand side of the machine and in the same position on the righthand side are a pair of 6.5mm microphone sockets and two mic level controls. This is a clue that this can be used as a Karaoke machine if you have the right program tapes (oops, discs). Apart from that, there is a bunch of other small buttons immediately above the microphone sockets but most of their func­tions are not immediately apparent. Connecting the player The first point which emphasises that this is not a re­placement for a typical VCR is that you cannot connect it to any ordinary TV set. Since it does not have an inbuilt RF modulator, the Philips DVD player can only be connected to a monitor with direct video and audio inputs. In my case, I was able to get around the problem. I have an older TV set but it does have a SCART socket for direct video and audio connections. With a suitable SCART cable I was in business. No doubt the Philips people would point out that if you want the full Also on the rear panel is a label stating “Regional Code 3” and this refers to the fact that DVD players have been crippled by being restricted to various World regions. The regions are as follows: (1). Canada, USA & USA territories (2). Japan, Europe, South Africa, Middle East (3). Southeast Asia, East Asia (including Hong Kong) (4). Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Central America, South America, Caribbean (5). Former Soviet Union, Indian subcontinent (includes Pakistan, etc). (6). China Hence, if you buy a machine intended for Region 4, it won’t play discs intended for other regions. This could really upset travellers who buy discs overseas and then come home to find that they won’t play in their machine. Actually, we wonder how long the DVD player manufacturers will bother enforcing this, since it was essentially forced upon them by the Hollywood film studios. Our review machine was stamped Region 3 and yet happily played Australian-produced movie discs. Clearly this regional locking can be disabled, at least by the manufacturers and their distributors. We imagine it is done by some quite simple procedure such as changing a link setting inside the machine or maybe even simpler, by feeding it a code from the remote control. Maybe the process is more complicated than this but it is likely to be a small software change of some sort. It stands to reason that this would be the case because the manufacturers April 1998  5 On the rear panel of the DVD840 there are a number of RCA sock­ets for video and audio outputs plus an AC-3 output for Dolby Surround sound decoders which can decode a digital signal. Note that there is no modulated RF output for connection to a TV set. are hardly likely to produce a different machine for each region – they will be the same for the whole world. In fact the review machine was multi-standard, being able to play PAL or NTSC, so why would there be separate machines for differ­ent world regions. Playing a disc Place a disc in the drawer, push the open/close button and there is a bit of a delay while the machine works out what you’ve put in it. It displays “LOADING” at this time. If you have loaded a DVD it will come up with an opening menu on the monitor screen and you can decide to play the disc as you would a normal video tape. Alternatively, you can use the remote control to step through the menu to a particular scene. There are two ways that the DVD840 will play an audio CD. First, you can hook it up to your normal stereo system and it will play the disc exactly as you would expect and respond to the remote control. For example, if you press “2” on the remote it will play track 2. It shows the track and time information on its front panel display, as would any normal CD player. If you have it hooked up to your TV or monitor it plays in exactly the same way but the screen display is the most unimagi­ native I’ve seen. All you get is a blue screen with the word “track” and a little box next 6  Silicon Chip to it with the track number. If you press PLAY, it then says play while the track number continues to flash. Pretty exciting, huh? Why couldn’t the designers have borrowed a leaf from a Windows CD player and had the same sort of features? Beats me. Even pretty ordinary VCRs these days have better on-screen displays. All the same, as a CD player it is clearly up with the best of conventional CD players in terms of its specifications and its sound quality is just fine. When you are playing a DVD, the on-screen display and all the options available depend on the disc itself and not the player. Therefore, you could have the option of showing the same video sequence from different camera angles, if in fact, the disc had been recorded with this information. None of the discs avail­able with the review player had this feature and we assume that it will mainly be applied to sports footage. One interesting feature is Zoom which lets you blow the picture up by a factor of four and you can move around the pic­ture to select the area to be magnified. This can be useful in some situations but as you can imagine, the picture quality is not as good when Zoom is in use. Having mentioned picture quality I should go on to state how good it is. First off, it is not as good as you might be led to believe from some overseas reviews. Ultimately, it is no better than the best pictures that a good PAL set is capable of. So the picture is equal to the best off-air reception that you would get in a strong signal area (no ghosts) and with a live studio shot, for example, a news reader or the weather forecast. Where it is clearly superior to even the best VCRs is that the picture is essentially noise free at all times, and even when the picture is a low-light scene there is no noise. This latter case always shows up VCRs and their noise content is all too obvious. Where the performance is also far superior to all but the best VCRs is in the clean noise free still pictures – they are very good. And this brings us to the remote control for the DVD840. Remote control As with most electronic appliances these days, most if not all functions are controlled via the remote control and many features cannot be accessed in any other way. This means that remote controls tend to have lots of buttons and a typical TV set’s remote might have 50 or more. With some of their TV sets, Philips actually supply two remote handpieces, one with all the features and lots of buttons while the other one is simple, with just a few buttons for the main features. This is a great idea! It means that if you lose one control temporarily, you can always fall back on the other one to get you out of trouble. Better still, you can put the main control away so that the junior people in the household don’t have the tempta­tion to fiddle with settings. SILICON CHIP SOFTWARE Now available: the complete index to all SILICON CHIP articles since the first issue in November 1987. The Floppy Index comes with a handy file viewer that lets you look at the index line by line or page by page for quick browsing, or you can use the search function. Notes & Errata: this file lets you quickly check out the Notes & Errata for all articles published in SILICON CHIP. Not an index but a complete copy of all Notes & Errata text (diagrams not included). The file viewer is included in the price, so that you can quickly locate any item. The Floppy Index and Notes & Errata files are supplied in ASCII format on a 3.5-inch or 5.25-inch floppy disc to suit PC-compatible computers. Note: the File Viewer requires MSDOS 3.3 or above. OR D ER FOR M PRICE ❏ Fl oppy Index (i ncl . fi l e vi ewer): $A7 ❏ Notes & Errata (i ncl . fi l e vi ewer): $A7 ❏ Al phanumeri c LCD Demo Board Software (May 1993): $A7 ❏ Stepper Motor Control l er Software (January 1994): $A7 ❏ Gamesbvm.bas /obj /exe (Ni cad Battery Moni tor, June 1994): $A7 ❏ Di ski nfo.exe (Identi fi es IDE Hard Di sc Parameters, August 1995): $A7 ❏ Computer Control l ed Power Suppl y Software (Jan/Feb. 1997): $A7 ❏ Spacewri .exe & Spacewri .bas (for Spacewri ter, May 1997): $A7 ❏ I/O Card (Jul y 1997) + Stepper Motor Software (1997 seri es): $A7 ❏ Random Number Generator/Chook Raffl e (Apri l 1998): $7 POSTAGE & PACKING: Aust. & NZ add $A3 per order; elsewhere $A5 Disc size required:    ❏  3.5-inch disc   ❏ 5.25-inch disc TOTAL $A Enclosed is my cheque/money order for $­A__________ or please debit my ❏ Bankcard   ❏  Visa Card   ❏ MasterCard Card No. Signature­­­­­­­­­­­­_______________________________  Card expiry date______/______ Name ___________________________________________________________ PLEASE PRINT Street ___________________________________________________________ Suburb/town ________________________________ Postcode______________ Send your order to: SILICON CHIP, PO Box 139, Collaroy, NSW 2097; or fax your order to (02) 9979 6503; or ring (02) 9979 5644 and quote your credit card number (Bankcard, Visa Card or MasterCard). ✂ It’s a pity Philips didn’t take the two-remote approach with this DVD player because frankly, the remote control is not all that easy to use. It doesn’t have all that many buttons but the layout does not seem logical or easy to use. Half the problem seems to be that the jog/shuttle control dominates the whole handpiece. The weight distribution also seems to be biased the wrong way so that the end you point is the heaviest. This is because the three AA cells are at that end. One of the photos accompanying this review shows the layout of buttons on the remote control so you can see what I am talking about when I say that it is not easy to use. These days you expect a remote control to be essentially intuitive; you don’t expect to have to consult the manual in order to operate even the most simple features. For example, where is the Play button. Peer at it for a while and you find it more or less centrally placed above the Eject button. Note that the Eject button is labelled but the Play button is not. Now where are the fast forward and reverse buttons? Answer: there aren’t any. You have to first push the Jog/Pause button and then you must use the jog/shuttle con­trol. With the Jog/Pause button active, you can rotate the Jog dial back and forth to move the picture back and forth a frame at a time. All of which is very neat but I think it is a bit point­ less. It might be attractive to people watching sports or porn movies but even there I think the attraction would quickly wear off. Anyway, back to fast forward or reverse: to get the player to fast forward you have to have the Jog/Pause button active and alight, as already mentioned, and then you can get the unit to play at half, one eighth, normal, twice, eight times or 32 times normal speed, by rotating the shuttle ring. But this is not easy to do because if you rotate the ring by just a fraction too much, it flicks to the next mode. The shuttle ring needs some detents to help in this respect. Fast forward at twice normal speed is the closest approxi­mation to normal VCR operation in terms of normal motion of the subjects. Note that most VCRs have fast forward at about nine times normal speed although the picture quality in this mode is not a patch on a DVD player. continued on page 96 April 1998  7 SILICON CHIP FLOPPY INDEX WITH FILE VIEWER Now available: the complete index to all SILICON CHIP articles since the first issue in November 1987. The Floppy Index comes with a handy file viewer that lets you look at the index line by line or page by page for quick browsing, or you can use the search function. All commands are listed on the screen, so you’ll always know what to do next. Notes & Errata also now available: this file lets you quickly check out the Notes & Errata (if any) for all articles published in SILICON CHIP. Not an index but a complete copy of all Notes & Errata text (diagrams not included). The file viewer is included in the price, so that you can quickly locate the item of interest. The Floppy Index and Notes & Errata files are supplied in ASCII format on a 3.5-inch or 5.25-inch floppy disc to suit PC-compatible computers. Note: the File Viewer requires MSDOS 3.3 or above. Price $7.00 each + $3 p&p. Send your order to: Silicon Chip Publications, PO Box 139, Collaroy 2097; or phone (02) 9979 5644 & quote your credit card number; or fax the details to (02) 9979 6503. Please specify 3.5-inch or 5.25-inch disc. Advertising Index Altronics................................. 24-26 Bainbridge Technologies..............91 Cybec Pty Ltd..............................31 Dick Smith Electronics..................... .................................. IFC,OBC,8-11 Embedded Pty Ltd.......................91 Emona.........................................65 Harbuch Electronics....................93 Instant PCBs................................95 Jaycar ................................... 45-52 Kalex............................................69 Microgram Computers...................3 Philips DVD Player . . . continued from page 7 Fast forward at 8 or 32 times normal speed merely flicks from frame to frame so it is not fast forward in the normal sense. All of which means that fast forward and reverse operation is not available in the way that you expect from a conventional VCR. In fact, after using the remote control I think that the Jog/Shuttle control should be deleted altogether. It’s a handy feature on a VCR if you want to do editing but that’s not really what the average user is likely to want to do. It would be better if the designers incorporated normal fast forward and reverse buttons with perhaps other buttons needed to be pressed to in­crease the speed of motion. I may have dwelt on the remote control in what appears to be unnecessary detail but really, since the machine must be operated by the remote control, it is appropriate to dwell on its merits and shortcomings. On balance, it doesn’t pass. In summary Really, the DVD840 is a very fine piece of up-to-the-minute technology. It gives flawless video and audio performance but it is let down by the operating features of its remote control. The recommended retail price of the Philips DVD-840 96  Silicon Chip is $1495 and it is available from selected retailers throughout Australia. Current movies are being released by Village Roadshow on DVD at $34.95 each. And now I must return to the theme mentioned at the begin­ning of this review and that is the suggestion that perhaps DVD players may not initially set the world on fire as a consumer product. In my household, there are three people who are inveter­ate video tapers. I am not one of them so my opinion probably carries less weight than theirs. They are always taping some show or other to watch later or to be saved for reference for sometime in the future. Otherwise they are often renting tapes which they will watch several times before they are returned. How did these video users react to the superior technology offered by the DVD player? The simple answer is that they were unaware of it. They did not notice the superior picture or sound quality and while they did play with the remote control and some of its functions they were just blase about it. When questioned about the merits of the player, two comments they made were notable and succinct: “You can’t make it fast-forward easily” and “You can’t record!” The last comment is perhaps the most telling. Draw your own conSC clusions. MicroZed Computers...................95 Oatley Electronics........................33 Premier Batteries.........................65 Preston Electronics......................95 Printed Electronics.......................95 Quest Electronics........................21 Rola Australia..............................95 Scan Audio..................................21 Silicon Chip Bookshop.................55 Silicon Chip Binders/Wallcht........87 Silicon Chip Software....................7 Silicon Chip Subscriptions..... 88-89 Zoom EFI Special........................81 Zoom Magazine.........................IBC Valve Electronics.........................77 _____________________________ PC Boards Printed circuit boards for SILICON CHIP projects are made by: •  RCS Radio Pty Ltd, 651 Forest Rd, Bexley, NSW 2207. Phone (02) 9587 3491. •  Marday Services, PO Box 19-189, Avondale, Auckland, NZ. Phone (09) 828 5730.