Arcam DiVA offers ‘cheat’ high-def
Your poor old DVDs have been sitting quietly concerned on your shelf as you babble on about Blu-Ray, but there’s hope for them yet – Arcam’s latest Di
Your poor old DVDs have been sitting quietly concerned on your shelf as you babble on about Blu-Ray, but there’s hope for them yet – Arcam’s latest DiVA player is offering to upscale their output to near-HD quality.
The DV137 was already a stonking marriage of movie machine and CD player, and now its Anchor Bay upscaling tech will take your dusty old discs and convert them into 720p, 1080i and 1080p outputs.
That’s good news for anyone getting a crook in their neck from watching the next-gen format war. While the first HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray films are available to order on import from Amazon.com, they won’t officially go on sale here till autumn at the earliest, and the first bits of hardware have only just been announced.
In short, it’s going to get messy, and the DV137 is a welcome alternative. Thanks to a partnership with audio expert Zoran, it can rival the CD audio output of many separates, and will hook up to your HD-telly via HDMI.
As you’d expect, though, it doesn’t come cheap – you’ll need to shell out £1200 to get your mitts on its AV powers. It’s available now on Arcam’s site.
Update (25/5/06): Arcam has told us that the suggested retail price of the DV137 will be £1250 not £1200, and that it will be available from mid-June from authorised dealers rather than directly from its site.
Dan Grabham
Editor-in-Chief 
