Marantz Embraces D-Theater HDTV D-VHS Format

[Gregg Lengling]

By Greg Tarr
TWICE
2/24/2003
 
   ITASCA, ILL.— Marantz recently became the first manufacturing partner to join JVC's D-VHS D-Theater camp by unveiling an S-VHS/D-VHS VCR — model MV8300.

The multiformat deck, which made its debut at 2003 CES, is scheduled to ship in the first quarter at a $1,599 suggested retail price.

It will record HD and SD digital broadcasts in digital bit stream form onto D-VHS cassettes and convert those signals to analog form for display on digital television sets and monitors. It also records and plays back analog signals in S-VHS and VHS formats.

Like JVC's D-VHS deck, the Marantz MV8300 receives digital signals through an IEEE-1394 interface connection.

Because the deck incorporates JVC's D-Theater decryption circuitry for content protected high-def packaged media, it will playback HDTV movies in the growing library of pre-recorded D-VHS D-Theater cassettes.

Digital recordings can be made either in bit-for-bit accurate form or compressed into one of several modes to fit more content on a tape.

For those who want to dub home videos into digital form on D-VHS cassettes, the deck adds a Frame Synchronizer features that produces the best possible picture quality from the source material.

In addition to the IEEE-1394 DTV input, the deck adds two IEEE-1394 camcorder inputs for DV format signals, in addition to two sets of A/V inputs with S-Video connections, and component video output for connection to most HDTV sets and monitors. An optical digital audio output with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio and 2-channel PCM digital audio capability is also supplied.

Programmed recording is facilitated by the addition of the VCR+Plus system. It also includes a video navigation function that encodes tapes by category, recording date and an ID number, which simplifies the process of locating and organizing favorite tapes.