You want the best video quality possible. So you head to the store, buy the largest, highest quality TV you can afford, spend a few hours tweaking the settings (the gamma levels, even!), and settle in on the couch to binge the hell out of the latest 4K goodness from Netflix or wherever.
That’s as good as it gets, right? Larry Pace, president and co-founder of DarbeeVision, would say otherwise.
“Everybody’s trying to get more out of their TV,” he told me. The company’s latest product, the DVP-5000S, can do exactly that, he says. “You put it between any video source and any display and you get a great pop and a wonderful sense of depth, clarity, and realism from your picture.”
Many companies claim to offer sharpness enhancements or boost the contrast of your image. DarbeeVision’s unique technology adds depth cues to the image to make even content from a Blu-ray player look noticeably better, he claims. Home Theater Review recently took a close look at the device and largely confirmed Pace’s claims, though the reviewer noted a few issues.
“There’s definitely a greater sense of clarity, image texture, and depth with Darbee Visual Presence engaged, but it also can make facial close-ups look unnatural and too harshly detailed, and it can accentuate noise in low-light situations.” Dialing the settings back to 80 percent “strikes a good balance, providing a noticeable improvement in detail and crispness without looking too noisy and artificial,” the site notes.
With just a single HDMI input and output, the DVP-5000S is a little limited. You’ll need to swap between inputs if you connect multiple video sources directly to your television. Put another way, the device seems simple to set up and configure, especially if you rely on a single source, such as a cable box or Blu-ray player.
The device sells for $249, but is on sale for a limited time at $199 — which is much cheaper than a new TV, eh?
