OK, without any further delay I wanted to post the new round of pictures I took using the Helios player and the Westinghouse 1080p display. While taking pictures of flat panel displays with an LCD camera is a bit daunting and undersells the impact of a high resolution display, the results are quite stunning in person:

Chicken Little via DVD at 1080p

King Kong (2005) via DVD at 1080p

The facial and hair detail in The Fifth Element were exceptional

These scenes revealed the poor deinterlacing and lack of 2:3 pulldown of the Helios DVD player

As shown above, this player has a phenomenal ability to reveal detail and texture. The images from The Fifth Element were so good I had to remind myself I was watching a standard definition DVD. The poor deinterlacing ability of this player and lack of 2:3 pulldown is its downfall, however. Much like Rainbow effect in DLP projectors, once you start to see jaggies - you're pretty much ruined.

Editorial Note: On Jaggies and 2:3 Pulldown
What is happening is that the DVD is encoded with 24fps material. The Helios player reads that and needs to convert it to 60fps 1080p output. The way it should do it is through a process known as 2:3 pulldown whereby the image is split into fields and reassembled in a way that allows 4 film frames to be inserted into 10 digital video frames - The concept being that you need to find a common way to get 24fps evenly into 60fps without altering the speed of the presentation. 2:3 pulldown works by showing every second frame for three fields. Because the only way to do this is through busting up the frames into fields and re-assembling them to get to the desired outcome, you run into the potential of getting jaggies. Some players are excellent at reducing or virtually eliminating jaggies - the Helios, for a reason unknown to us, only provides 2:3 pulldown while in 480p mode. This means that if you are using it at 720p or 1080p you will see jaggies - and lots of them.

If NeoDigits can improve upon this important aspect of the player they will have developed a product that can begin to compete with much more expensive models on the market.

Listening Evaluation

The player continued to function well with audio. As it features HDMI and optical/coaxial S/PDIF outputs, there would be no reason to evaluate the unit's analogue outputs at this time. The only reason I could see wanting to use those would be if you lacked Dolby Digital and/or DTS decoding but had a multi-channel analogue input on your older Pro Logic receiver. Since I would be evaluating the receiver and loudspeaker system and not the DVD player, we'll just cut this listening evaluation short and note that we noticed no anomalies or lip sync issues.

Conclusion

When NeoDigits asked us to review their "new" HVD2085 player I smiled to myself. Taking a quick peek, I knew this to be a re-badged version of the NeuNeo player with a couple tweaks and a new remote control. After thinking about it, however, I realized that I should really try to see the output on a 1080p display - something I had not been able to do previously. After doing so I can now see the attraction for those looking to get the most out of their existing DVD collection. If you have a display that can take 1080p input, you owe it to yourself to experience the full potential of your movies. If however, you are going to be bothered by the presence of jaggies on horizontal lines and almost any hard-edge diagonal movement across the screen, then you may want to sit this one out. I know of no other player that gives you this level of resolution at this price. Let's hope NeoDigits continues to improve their product.

Helios HVD2085

MSRP: $199
http://www.neodigits.com