The Official 9G Pioneer General Discussion Thread - Page 238

Fair enough. Similar to the above post by irwinroad, my concern is that since D-nice posted most of his info in this thread, it has garnered the most attention of the 9g threads. But if there is a way to at least insert his first few posts of this thread to the other ones, that would be sweet. If he wanted this of course

I responded to irwinroad two posts back..hope it solves the issue enough to be acceptable.

chris

Nope, it can send 480p but not 480i over HDMI.

oops didn't see that. Just read it, sounds good to me.

I think you all have taken my original query on aspect ratio in wrong spirit. I do not recall suggesting cropping/distorting image to fill screen is better than widescreen. I merely observed that widescreen results in wasting pixels - but that's how it is intended by the film producer and that's fine.

I remember D-Nice's comments that Pioneer's own upscaling is much better than most of the upconverting dvd players. I think I agree with him. To use Pioneer's upscaling, one has to send 480i or p signal. When doing so, I found that I can use "Cinema" mode which almost fills up the screen. I looked hard and compared it with WS but cannot find or determine if the image is cropped or distorted. Just want to know if my finding is correct or am I missing something?

Again, please understand I am not pushing to fill up the screen at the expense of image quality so don't bombard me with those remarks.

BTW, the cheapest way to send 480i raw to pioneer xx20s is using toshiba hd-a30. This is an HD-DVD player and can be had in barely used condition for less than $100 on ebay. They also send 1080p24. SD DVDs look great. Audio is very good too. Am waiting on Emotiva UMC-1 to try out TrueHD.

Just to add a little more detail:

Deinterlacing is a big Kuro advantage so D-Nice suggests sending 480i using a HDMI connection. Letting the DVD player deinterlace 480i to 480p would be a disadvantage. Using a component connection would also be a disadvantage.

The replies that you've gotten may stem from your first questions on that topic.

The video geek in me is curious: does it use motion compensation or is it just motion adaptive? (Well, I assume it is at least motion adaptive and not just a simple bobber.)

It's not a bobber, but beyond that, I don't know.

It's not motion adaptors or enhancers. It's simple deinterlacing, or rather not-so-simple deinterlacing since so many components get it wrong.

I believe that given the tests I've read that the Kuro does pass, it must be at the very least motion adaptive. Otherwise the motion resolution would be much lower than seems to be reported.

But I'm hoping it's one of the few deinterlacers that use motion compensation. It's much more computationally expensive, and tough to get right, but the quality improvement over the comparatively simpler motion adaptive approaches is very apparent.

The 151 has a setting for the de-interlacing function. As the manual doesn't really explain what the different options actually do, may one of you guys who know a lot about this could give some insight, and maybe even some advice on when to use which settings. The options are:

1 = optimizes video images
2 = standard setting
3 = optimizes still images

Based on this I strongly suspect it is strictly motion adaptive, and these settings allow one to tune the motion threshold.

In other words, when set to 1, it will be more likely to consider a block in motion (and therefore bob it), whereas with option 3 it will be more likely to consider a block as static (and therefore weave it).

Without experimenting with the settings I have nothing to say about them, but I'd suspect leaving it set to 2 probably is the better default.

It's a bit disappointing, but I'm not terribly surprised. Motion compensating deinterlacers seem to exist in only very high end equipment. (Maybe some of the better outboard processors do it?)

Please forgive me if this has been answered, but I want to make sure I understand. Reading through the thread, I understand that the Kuro (mine is the 151) automatically upconverts 480i/p, 720i/p and 1080i to 1080p, which is it's native resolution. However, when I pass a 480p signal, I press "Display" and it shows 480p on the Plasma. I can also see that the picture is lower quality than 1080p. When I have the PS3 or DVD player upconvert to say 1080i/p, then I see the much better quality picture on the Plasma and the "Display" reads 1080i/p. So what am I doing wrong or is there a setting on the Kuro that I am overlooking, that makes the Kuro upconvert? Manual was of no use to me in this regard. As always, I appreciate the help provided by this forum's members.

The Kuro automatically upconverts to the native resolution. It is hard to explain why 480p is lower quality than 1080p unless you are down-scaling a 1080p source to 480p in the player. If you feed the Kuro a 480p signal from a 480p source the signal will most like be as good or better than having the player upscale it to 1080p. The Kuros are excellent at scaling.

When you press "display" on your remote, the resolution that it shows on the screen (480p/1080i/etc) is only to show you the resolution on the incoming signal.
When it says "480i", that means what you are seeing is 480i upconverted to 1080p.
When it says "480p", that means what you are seeing is 480p upconverted to 1080p.
When it says "720i", that means what you are seeing is 720i upconverted to 1080p.
When it says "720p", that means what you are seeing is 720p upconverted to 1080p.
When it says "1080i", that means what you are seeing is 1080i upconverted to 1080p.
When it says "1080p", that means what you are seeing is 1080p upconverted to 1080p.

you are always seeing 1080p. the quality and resolution of the source is why you see differences

At least with the HQV test DVD, the PS3 (with current software) is actually better at deinterlacing 480i than my 150. I have also compared the PS3 to a Denon DVD 3930 (which has the Realta chip) and the two are comparably good at deinterlacing video material (using not only the HQV test DVD but also real-world program material). However, the Denon is slightly better at sharpening the image and doing noise reduction.

The 150's deinterlacer came in well behind the PS3 and Denon. It took a long time to lock onto the 3:2 cadence in the "Speedway" test (both the Denon and the PS3 were extremely quick) and also showed substantially more "feathering" or "combing" artifacts with real-world video-originated material. The 150's deinterlacing is good, but I would not call it "excellent." It's clearly not up to the current state of the art.

Cool, D-Nice.

Let us know what tools we'll need and to the extent that regular Kuros can match their Elite counterparts.

De-interlacing is one thing, but scaling is another. When we are talking about the difference between 480p and 1080p we talking about scaling -- and that the Kuros do very well.

I also compared my 8G Kuro's de-interlacing to the PS3 and found the Kuro to be better. The image had more detail and was more realistic with well authored titles like Star Wars. I wasn't so much looking at torture tests as real world viewing. I remember the Kuro having troubles with certain cadences compared to the HD-XA2 or the OPPO 983, but I don't put much value on that compared to the overall image that you get with the vast majority of released DVDs. I guess it depends on what is important to you. I personally tend to spend more time watching movies than calibration discs

I agree. Another one that beats it as well is the OPPO 983 with ABT de-interlacing. I think sometimes people confuse the excellent scaling capabilities of the Pio's with the de-interlacing capability....... two different things altogether. Not that the Pio de-interlacing is bad, just not the king of the hill some think it is.

John

Can you possibly change the layout of the NR,DRE,BLK LVL,ACL,ENHAN, GAMMA,CTI for each video mode(movie, Game, standard,etc)?

This is for D-Nice or anyone that knows the real answer to this question.
I have the ps3 and the 5020. I have been using D-Nice's movie settings and they are great. I only tweaked teh colour up to my liking. However, last night i was playing with teh ps3 settings during a movie so i could get direct comparisons. I went into video settings and was switching between RGB colour and Yp/Cb/Rc/Bp or whatever the letters are. and the setting i usually had the ps3 on was the Yp/Cb... so when i switched to RGB i noticed the colours in the movie had alot more pop to them. then went i swtiched back the colours were more soft. So i was thinking if I did not tweak D-Nice's colours up a couple notches on the RGB setting would the be the correct ps3 setting. So in other words, my question is should i be using the RGB colour or the Yp/Pb/Rc.. thing? Let me know, thanks

Thanks for your persistence on researching the SM.
Will be interested to hear what you think the improvement can be from calibrating on the non-Elites.

Is anyone using their 9G with an HTPC? What settings are you using on the Pioneer, and what settings on the PC?

I've got a 6020 and an ATI HD4850, but I can't figure out what to set on each. Regular 1920x1080 @ 60hz looks fine when playing Batman Begins Blu-ray, with the 6020 in simple movie mode. Anything else that would improve this? Thanks a bunch!

D-Nice - is calibrating the non-elites via the service menu something the average avsforum user will be able to do with a proper guide, and is it something that a professional calibrator would do, or would they not want to mess with the service menu...?

Thanks for all your work. I just watched Apocolypto on Blu-Ray w/ your reference settings and it looked absolutely fantastic.

Hey D-man ( I say that with the greatest respect and smile on my face)

As a 5010 owner, would I be correct to assume the instructions on how to get to the SM on my model and the values for the grey scale calibration are somewhere in the 8G calibration/settings thread? (wonders if I could bribe you enough to come to Charleston to oversee the process

Oh, btw, had a good friend that owns a sign business cut down my stand and drill new holes in the stand for the bolts..................... got it back today, my 5010 now sits nice and flush like an Elite with no gap at the bottom

John