Sony STR-DA5200ES A/V Receiver

VIDEO PERFORMANCE The Sony STR-DA5200ES's scaler uses Faroudja DCDi (Directional Correlation Deinterlacing) technology that can reformat signals up to 1080p through the HDMI output and up to 1080i through the component-video output (signals from S-video and composite-video outputs remain at 480i only, of course). The Sony overlays its GUI displays on any of its outputs, so the onscreen image of whatever you're playing appears beneath the semitranslucent menus on every hookup - woo hoo! Furthermore, the receiver up- or cross-converts any lesser-resolution signal coming in on any input to the HDMI or component output at the currently set resolution. Result? The holy grail of a single HDMI cable from receiver to TV, with you simply selecting sources via the receiver, always having access to the onscreen menus, and always getting the best possible picture, at least in theory.

And the practice is pretty close, too. I used Sony's excellent, 1080p-capable KDL-40XBR2 LCD HDTV (reviewed November), and images looked quite uniformly excellent. One caveat: The current multi-scaler state of the A/V world makes this kind of evaluation tricky: My Comcast HD box, Panasonic upconverting DVD player, and everyday TV (a Samsung DLP), as well as the Sony XBR display used for this review, all can (and in the latter cases, always do) also scale video signals. Consequently, you can't always be sure which product's processing is doing what to the signal you're looking at.

That said, I'm fairly comfortable that the 5200ES's Faroudja scaler gave excellent service in just about every mode. I could easily compare 480p coming from the DVD player going directly into a component-video input on the TV with the same signal scaled to 1080p (or other resolution) by the receiver and output as HDMI. No great surprise: Compared with the TV performing its own internal 1080p upconversion from its analog input, the receiver won hands down. For instance, in the shot opening Chapter 8 of The Island, the solidity and coherence of the falling-water feature were obviously better, more film-like. Making comparisons between the DVD player's own 1080i upconversion and the receiver's 1080p was far more difficult and thus inconclusive. But either way, I've rarely seen DVD video look better on my system. On many a Cessna-priced manufacturer's demo system, sure, but not here in my studio.

The STR-DA5200ES made a much more obvious (and welcome) difference when I viewed standard-def cable. Setting its scaler to 720p, 1080i, or 1080p (or even 480p) yielded noticeably better pictures. Close inspection of the original signal revealed that, as I find with almost all scalers, unprocessed 480i actually included as much or more fine detail, but with much more visible line structure and video noise. The receiver-processed versions, on the other hand, showed snappier, bold edges and more vibrant color ranges, with just a slightly softer overall look. The lower the rez of the original source, the harder it got to judge the differences among receiver-scaled 720p/1080i/p: DVDs, for example, were clearly superior in the 1080 settings on this 1080p display, while upconverted standard-def television could be tough to call.

The 5200ES's video processing extends another groundbreaking receiver feature: picture-in-picture. There are some limitations: There's no TV tuner built into the receiver (now there's a thought), and the feed for the PIP window is limited to standard-def signals coming in on either the composite- or S-video inputs. And there's no "swap" command to make the PIP image the main picture. Nevertheless, the potential usefulness is there. And should your TV or cable box or both have their own PIP processing, you could conceivably rig up PIP-IP, or even PIP-IP-IP.