Sony DAV-DZ100 Review

The Sony DAV-DZ100 is a very nice piece of kit. Although not exceptionally beautiful it does look and feel modern and sexy, compared to some of the other similarly low priced models which can seem clunky and plastic. It comes with a DVD player / amp combined unit, 5 speakers, and a subwoofer, and includes a built in radio tuner.

Support for media formats is good - it can manage to play DVDs, CDs, CD-R, CD-RW, MP3 CDs, DIVX CDs, SVCD, VCD and JPEG Photo CDs. In terms of sound decoders it comes with support for Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS and ProLogic II, the latter of which is designed to enhance the quality of your VCR playback.

The amp is very well specced - it produces 720W RMS to make some nice loud noise, and is 100% digital, so your sound doesn't have to go through an analogue converter before it is played. The visual enhancements on the DAV-DZ100 include Sony's own "Precision Cinema Progressive" technology, which is their latest version of Progressive Scan. It claims to optimise the video at a pixel, rather than line level, so the visuals should be good. Let see how it performs...

Getting the Sony DAV-DZ100 out of the box and setting it up is nice and easy - there's very little faff involved in comparison to some of the competitors. Once its set up the performance is pretty much spot on. Sounds are crisp, clear, loud and balanced, and the images are sharp and well rounded. There is very little evidence of MPEG artifacts, even on the most hazy of images. We couldn't see much difference between the Precision Cinema Progressive and normal progressive scan, but progressive scan is perfectly adequate for even the most fussy home-cinema fanatics.

So what could possibly go wrong? Well, there has to be something. The Sony DAV-DZ100 comes with pretty meagre input support - in fact, there's virtually nothing worth talking about. So if you're wanting to connect lots of devices to your home cinema system then this unit is probably not for you. It also lacks in the output department somewhat, coming with only one RGB Scart output - no S-Video in sight. This is obviously a big shame for something that includes such great software visual enhancements.

Pros

Super audio and video quality
Nice price
Easy setup

Cons

No S-Video output
Miserable input support
Progressive scan by any other name is still progressive scan

Conclusion

The Sony DAV-DZ100 is a nice home cinema system. It has good support for a wide range of media and supports all of the most common audio encoding. Its well priced, looks reasonably nice and produces some great sound and vision. It falls down with a distinct lack of input support and S-Video out is very badly missed. If you're wanting to keep your setup simple, go for this. If you want to do something a little cleverer with your system and use it with other input hardware, its not for you.

Other Resources