Onkyo Readies HD DVD Player

By Joseph Palenchar -- TWICE, 8/10/2007

Upper Saddle River, N.J. — Onkyo USA plans fall shipments of its first HD DVD player, which will retail for a suggested $899.

The DV-HD805 features decoders for all of the disc format’s optional and mandatory surround-sound formats, which will travel over the player’s HDMI 1.3a output in native form to Onkyo receivers equipped with HDMI 1.3a inputs. The supported surround codecs include lossless-compression codecs Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio as well as the lossy formats Dolby Digital Plus and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio.

HDMI version 1.3a also supports Deep Color technology to improve color tones and achieve finer color gradation, the company added.

The Onkyo DV-HD805 also supports different frame rates, including playback at 24 frames per second, the native frame rate of the original sources for most HD content, Onkyo said.

The Onkyo player also features an Ethernet port to stream disc-related bonus features and let users upload content and interact with providers. Another feature is onboard HQV Reon VX video processing chipset to upscale DVDs to 720p, 1080i or 1080p.