Hollywood Plus DVD decoder review
Posted by Thomas
McGuire on September 21, 2000 - Page 3/7
Company:
Sigma
Designs Product: Hollywood
Plus DVD Decoder
Image
quality
When
viewing a DVD with the Hollywood Plus on your monitor it is
displayed in 24-bit colour, even when your graphics card is
set at a lower colour depth than this. This ensures
you get the best image quality for DVD playback regardless
of the graphics card you have in your system.
Of
some note is that image quality may degrade if outputting
onto your monitor. Why? Well this may happen when using the
pass-through cable to connect your video card to the
Hollywood Plus & the Hollywood Plus to your monitor –
particularly at higher resolutions (1024*768+). Although
personally I noticed no degradation of my desktop
display, nor image quality in games, I used 1024*768 maximum
in either of those areas.
Unfortunately,
it proved impossible to take screenshots of the Hollywood
Plus in action. Why? Well, Hypersnap wouldn't/couldn't take
any screen images of the overlay & the capture utility
in the DVD station cannot take shots from a DVD due to
copyright protection. If anything this at least proves that
the copy protection works correctly.
NOTE
- As a result of the copy protection, the “closest”
possible image quality needed to be used for DVD shots. In
my opinion, this had to be Power DVD. Shots for the
Hollywood Plus are in fact from PowerDVD. Although don’t
let this dissuade you from their accuracy. Comparing a
screen capture from PowerDVD to paused footage from the
Hollywood Plus is extremely close in most circumstances. So,
although in the comparison the picture is in fact Power DVD,
the conclusions drawn are solely from the Hollywood Plus.
With that, on with the Image quality review.
These
first 2 shots are from The Matrix, in particular pay
attention to the grooves in the case in both pictures. The
first shot is from Cinemaster 99, the second from the
Hollywood Plus.
As you can clearly see, the grooves in the case are
badly defined in the software decoder. Compared to the
previous shot the first one (Cinemaster 99) stands out as
being quite bad. These shots are essentially only a small
taster of the differences, although the differences are
noticeable.
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