I have recently noticed what looks like frames being dropped. I was watching my Star Trek TMP DVD a few days ago, and there are a number of scenes showing this behavior. One good scene in this DVD that shows this is when the Enterprise launches from Earth and does its pass by Jupiter. In both shots, the Enterprise jerks along as it flys through the scene. Thinking it might be the DVD, I tried it in my ps3, and the motion of the ship was smooth. This happens at every resolution and framerate on my XA2, except 1080p24. Sadly, I get very bad combing artifacts with this disk at 1080p24.
I even tried switching it to 480i output on component, and it STILL showed this frame dropping on this disk. This suggests to me that my XA2 is not deinterlacing properly, and as well that the XA2 is actually not capable of outputting raw 480i from DVD, but it is rather actually deinterlacing 480i to 480p, and then converting back to 480i for output.
Unfortunately, I don't know if this is new behavior from my XA2, or if it has always been doing this and I didn't notice it before. Previously when I had watched this particular DVD, it had been at 1080p24.
I tried both firmare 2.7 and 4.0.