Yamaha DVD-S1800BL 1080p Upconverting DVD SACD Player, Great as an upscaling DVD and SACD player
I bought this Yamaha to replace a nice upscaling DVD player from Toshiba which my son broke. I chose this Yamaha for both its upscaling reputation and its SACD support. Feature and performance-wise, I have been very happy with the product.
As a DVD player, the S1800 supports DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW and DVD-Audio well, in addition to DVD-Video. For DVD-Video, upscaling to 1080p appears to work really well, even though this is a model from 2007 (hence the big discount offered by Amazon.com). I have played a variety of DVDs from Pixar animations to old Disney classics to recent action titles and so on, and all look really nice on my Sharp 1080p LCD TV.
One good thing about the DVD player is it’s quite fast, at least compared to most other DVD players. From loading a DVD to recalling the menu, there’s no trying the user’s patience with blank screens. Another good feature is, as with other upscaling players, by default all 4:3 DVDs is displayed stretch on a 16:9 screen if you use the HDMI connection (and who doesn’t nowadays?), but there is a menu item (Setup -> Video -> Widescreen Format -> Pillar Box) that manually overrides the stretch, so you can make 4:3 content look right on your widescreen TV. Just remember to set it back to "off" for 16:9 content. Yes, this is a hassle (i.e., no automatic switching), but this beats the hell out of all those upscaling players on the market that don’t let you unstretch 4:3 content over HDMI at all. We watch a lot of kids’ TV shows, so this is a really welcome feature. (Maybe I should buy another unit and lock the widescreen stretch on each…)
As an SACD player this unit takes advantage of Yamaha’s experience in building hi-fi systems. Sound quality from my SACDs (classical music) is truly amazing, revealing subtle details that even my best CD deck failed to reveal before.
I have not tried the DivX playback feature, nor the VCD/SVCD support.
While the features and performance are laudable, the remote and the manual are truly miserable. The remote has a big round power button, but the idiot who designed this made it to *only* turn on the player, not turn it off. For the latter function you use the smaller Standby button, which *also* turns on the player! Most of the buttons are small, and there is no eject button on the remote. Must be a Japanese thing, since this seems common on Japanese-brand DVD players. The manual is very difficult to understand. First, it was written by some idiots. Second, it was written for the UK/Europe/Russia market. Luckily, you can figure out 95% of the features and connections on your own, unless you’re a complete newbie to DVD players.
As to the question why you should get a DVD player while you can now buy a low-end Blu-ray player for as low as $20 more, the answer is twofold. First, upscaling DVD players are still better at playing DVDs, especially one like this Yamaha which loads DVDs fast. Second, if you watch a lot of DVDs, you may not want to tax the laser mechanism in a Blu-ray player, which works better reading Blu-ray discs. Finally, for this model specifically, some of the extra features like DVD-Audio and SACD support are not found on Blu-ray players.