I have been using the Jaton PSD7611K for a little over 8 months now. I bought it primarily for its PAL to NTSC conversion capability and karaoke features.

The player is quite sturdily built with a rather large metal casing and plastic faceplate, on which only the necessary buttons are logically laid out. The microphone volume and echo effect buttons are on the left and the only way to access these features; on the right side, the Play, Pause, Stop, Fast Forward, Rewind, Chapter Skip and Mute buttons provide the common functionalities of the same name and are repeated on the remote control.

Most of the movies I watch on the PSD7611K are region 2 discs in PAL format. The review I’m writing here recalls what I saw and heard when I first used the player to play back the only such movie I had in my DVD collection; just know that so far, everything that I say here applies for the other movies I’ve subsequently watched on the player. For my first region 2 PAL movie, I initially kept the interlaced default scan type and made sure the output picture format was set to NTSC (I now watch all my movies in the progressive scan mode). I have a widescreen HDTV-ready television so I used the TV’s internal line doubler to eliminate the scan lines. The picture quality was very good with nice color saturation; however, the picture did not seem "steady" at all times and in some parts of it I could see a wave-like form of movement (most noticeable on horizontal edges of objects). I talked to Jaton about it and a couple of days later (kudos to them!) they came up with a solution which was essentially to open up all the features of the Mediamatics chipset which is at the heart of the PSD7611K player. The upgrade on my machine was done via a disc given to me by Jaton and took all but three minutes. After the upgrade completed I had a new Video Display menu item with which I was able to adjust the Vertical Interpolation setting from Field to Frame: this solved my problem and produced a gorgeous, rock-solid picture. I was really impressed.

Next, I connected the component video outputs of the player to the wideband 480p/1080i inputs of my TV and set the scan mode to Progressive in the Video Signal/Scan Type menu. I was blown away as the picture was even better as in interlaced mode using the TV’s internal line doubler. No need to play with the Vertical Interpolation setting, I left everything as it was and enjoyed the playback. I never noticed any video artifacts like pixelization, posterization, etc. The black levels were very decent, the picture flicker-free and very film-like.

As far as sound quality goes, everything was just the way it should have been; most of the movies I watch are old and encoded in mono or stereo sound, not Dolby Digital 5.1/DTS. Even in these not-so-great conditions, the Jaton did a very good job in reproducing movie dialogues, always clear and free of distortion at decent volume levels, as well as soundtracks.

I did watch parts of a couple of zone 1 NTSC movies and I’m happy to say that the player handled these beautifully as well. In one instance, the Monsters, Inc. 2-disc Collector Edition DVD, the PSD7611K did a much better job than my other player, a Philips DVD953 (with progressive-scan capability as well) which produces a flickering and shimmering picture in some scenes.

I have used the player for its karaoke features as well and found that it does a very decent job with karaoke DVD discs which are often poor video transfers; setting up the player to my Denon receiver via its 5.1 analog outputs was a snap and the sound produced is very good, especially when you know that a lot of these discs are not audio gems either… The microphone volume and echo effect buttons work as expected.

Although I don’t use the PSD7611K much for audio CD listening, I will mention here that the player did play a couple of discs that my Philips player always refused to play for some reason.

I have two gripes about the player. The first one is minor: the standby light on the faceplate is very bright and never turns off. It can become annoying to see this big red light always on during movie playback. I would expect it to turn itself off as I power the player on.

The second one is a bit more of a problem, but I can live with it: during playback of extras on all the region 2 PAL DVDs I’ve watched on the player, rather severe combing was taking place, where one would see white interlaced lines show up on the screen in a comb-like fashion when there was movement in the picture. As I understand it, this is due to the difference of the frame rate between video shot in PAL and the NTSC standard. Maybe Jaton will come up with an upgrade of the player that will fix this problem. However, I have to admit that I never heard of a PAL/NTSC player that can handle that type of playback correctly, including all the Malata models.

All in all, I’m extremely pleased with the PSD7611K; all its features work as advertised and the player definitely does better than the competition, as I’ve been able to see for myself when using other players capable of PAL/NTSC conversion in progressive scan mode. Finally, I will mention that Jaton added an X-Y scaling feature via software update which gives the player a very important feature it was missing for some time.

NOTE: All Jaton 7611K units sold here have the latest firmware - though no ugrades are necessary at this time, the player remains future upgradeable.