All 1080p is not created equal - a Blu-ray Player Benchmark - Page 3

Yeah, really great work!!!



Well, THX (like Dolby) do not exist to improve fidelity. They exist to make money. THX are not going to try and improve the Nth little degree of fidelity at the expense of their bottom line; they won't try to mandate something that vendors would be highly resistant to because then they won't get fees from those vendors. Consider how many crappy cassette decks offered Dolby B! I'm not saying this in a cynical tone; it's just business.

i dont understand why all (serious) reviewers dont check for proper color space output. i even recall a review over at cnet where they said that it wasnt an important metric and that people concerned about that should be looking at reference players instead...

I'm just wondering if the ability to display a good image has improved or not since I bought my last player about 3 years ago.

Looking at some of the various players I see alot of new features added to them all. 3D has become common place amongst other things. But is all that's new is just more and more features? Or have they actually improved upon being able to display a better picture as well?

My current player is a Panasonic dmp-bd60 which I bought new about 3 years ago or so.

My TV is a 6 month old DLP 73" Mits WD-73640.

My only main reason for thinking of upgrading is to improve the PQ. And with seemingly good players being had for as low $130.00 or so, it seems like a really good price if the PQ can be improved upon.

Anyone recently upgrade that can comment if they noticed any visual or even audible improvements?

Right now I'm thinking of going with a Panasonic DMP-BDT220.

Thanks!

As far as PQ you realistically won't see a difference, maybe an improvement with DVDs.

The only reason to upgrade would be to shorten BD loading times which might make it worth the upgrade.

I have the BD30 and also BD-65 and if your BD-60 is the same year as my BD-30 you won't gain anything AFA BD PQ and DVD PQ may be worse. The newer BDPs will be smaller and as mentioned quicker but NOT better PQ. Truthfully I would have preferred another BD-30 instead of my smaller BD-65 but when I purchased the 65 the 30 was long gone. The 65 is a nice player but I just like a few of the little features dropped on the newer 65

Thanks guys for the replies.

I might just stick with my current player then for another year or so. I just wasn't sure if there was any real reason to upgrade unless I was wanting to get newer, more features. I'm not too interested in going with 3D right now. My load times are a tad slower than I would like but I'm not really crazy about upgrading just to speed things up. And all the new apps and all that stuff that come on the newer players look great but I doubt I'd ever use em. So for me all I was hoping to get was just better PQ. But if they had already reached that ceiling and couldn't improve things anymore in the last few years, than I see no reason to upgrade. Even if it is only around $130.00.

Maybe next years players will improve upon that area, and also there will be more 3d titles out to make it worthwhile. And maybe Netflix will finally start having 3d titles for rent!

I think I'm gonna pull the trigger on a Panasonic DMP-BDT220 anyways here in the next few days or so. For the price why not I guess.

Post back your impressions on it's PQ, I'm also kind of partial to Panasonics for BD players, for DVD players I preferred Sony but NOT for BD players.

I had a 65 inch Mits DLP, with an LG BD390, and the picture quality was very good. I found that upgrading my television improved the pq. The DLP image seems soft compared to my current set (sharp lc-70le640u).

When I bought the Sharp, I found a Sony bdp-s770 on the shelf at bby for 86 bucks. That was a great deal for a 3D player. And it was bundled with a 3D blu-ray of Monster House! The picture quality difference between the Sony and the LG is negligible. The Sony has more streaming options, and is much smaller, but does not have VUDU.

I do think the Sony is a much better sounding player than the LG. It also plays back SACD discs. The LG was new about three years ago - and at the time was a top of the line player, just like the Sony.

I prefer the Sony because of the menu structure - it is much easier to use than the LG.
Look for a player that has built in wi-fi and a gig of onboard storage, and you should be good to go.

Curious what model Dlp? I find my big Mits 73738 (BDP is an Oppo95) as sharp as any display on the market and produces stunning images and wouldn't consider calling any tv an upgrade until 4k hits the seen

It was a WD-Y65, exclusive to Circuit City back in January of 2007. Very similar to the WD-65732. The LED has much more detail and depth to the image, in my opinion. Also, it's dead quiet. My room has wood floors, and the fan noise was a little bothersome. Other than the fan noise, it gave me no issues over the last 5 years.
Edited by myoda - 6/6/12 at 8:09am

A lot has changed since 2007 with DLP, but I do understand the need to upgrade your display and the Sharp was a nice choice:)

The results are not anecdotal, but the product of a good set of tests done by these folks . The article shows where the problem is and why it matters. In the second article, they show that when using a player that has issues to calibrate your display, you may take a properly calibrated display and introduce problems in the display settings.

Nothing is implanting more pixels, since the 1920 x 1080 of 1080p is set in stone, the issues come into how the pixels that are being displayed are being set, what color they are being set to and the effects on the overall viewing experience. If, as the first article shows, the Oppo correctly maps the pixel data read from the disk to the correct color on the display, but the Sony player doesn't, then pixel data is being displayed incorrectly.

An example from the article of the mapping of colors as they measured it:



Sony's color mapping is incorrect throughout, sending data to the display that is different from what is on the disk.



Oppo's color mapping is exact.

The effect this has is that the color you see is shifted off slightly, and you may not see the brightest colors correctly, since you've squashed any differentiation between them. Other colors are off as well.

In the final analysis, you can decide for yourself whether having a correct display of the pixels is worth it to you, but the fact that it's happening or not happening is documented here.

Here's a couple of key sentences from the article comparing the Oppo to the Sony:

How would they hold up to more advanced testing that wasn't possible before?

We were quite surprised by these data, as it seemed that everyone, including ourselves, had loved the Sony player.


What the tells me is that the differences are there only with advanced testing and not in real world situations and viewing.

So, if you mainly use your Blu Ray player to run test patterns and evaluate the color spectrum, the Oppo is the clear choice. If you use your Blu Ray player to watch TV and movies, there's no difference.

The problem for me is that this distortion in which colors are shown where affects the final displayed image - not just of test patterns, but the actual movies.

The effect may be subtle, but it is there. I was answering the statement that there was no difference between bluray players in PQ, specifically the Oppo, this shows that there is, was also answering that the information about the Oppo was anecdotal, which it is not.

If what you're saying is that yes there is an issue, but it doesn't matter, like I mentioned, this is a matter of personal choice then but not one of all bluray players being equal. In that case then the argument becomes that it's good enough.

The color space that is being used to display colors doesn't only come on for test patterns, but also for any bluray image that is coming in. If the distortion is OK for someone, then it is a personal choice to not care about it. Certainly the image is good enough to give a very good presentation, but if I can see 90% of the colors versus 100% where they are supposed to be, then that's what the difference is - I think I'd like to see all of the colors correctly on my display.

I agree that the issue wasn't found until better tests were done, and that for most people (even experts) the difference is not noticeable. My own personal opinion is that the reason it wasn't found is that color space is applied equally across the board; a color (say red) at a particular value will be the same for every dot on the screen for that value. So any time that the disk says "this is red" the player send that number to the screen to display what is now different from what was on the disk.

So the display 'looks' fine since it is consistent across the board. The place where it may become more evident is in situations where you are displaying the brightest colors at different levels. In a player that does the color table properly, the gradation between colors is there, giving you a fuller image, where if it's not done right, the colors are basically all the same.

It's not life and death, just a simple hardware lookup table that in this case is for colors. It does lie at the heart of the quality of the picture and an incorrect implementation of the translation between disk and display, which is what these players are responsible for. As I mentioned before, there's no problem with getting a player that is not perfect in its color translation, it's just good to know that you're making that choice. It also shows compromises that are being made by some companies, while they are not being made by others. Maybe by finding something like this, the manufacturer may have an incentive to fix it.

I've dealt with color lookup tables when writing device drivers for computer displays - this technology has been around for at least forty years in my experience, and is modified by firmware, which is why two devices with the same or similar components may have different performance - it's the quality of the programming.

Again, not the end of the world, as most bluray players are very good, but in my opinion, different - just maybe not different enough to warrant the extra 2-300 dollars.

IIRC, hometheaterhifi.com acknowledged that secret shootout results for Sony BDP-S570 was erroneous and I think they retracted the test results for Sony S570... they didn't test S570 in default video mode but in cinema(?) mode or something which threw off the results.

Do you have a link for that? The two articles are still on their website.

What really needs to happen is a double blind experiment comparing multiple players. The tester won't know and obviously the test subjects wouldn't. Every piece of equipment is identical save the players. Set the players to 'direct' or the equivalent. Get a dozen or two very experienced blu ray reviewers/testers. See if they can reliably and consistently spot differences between players. My money says they can't, not consistently anyway. But we need such a test, several of them actually, to dispel the notion that there are "super" cables or processors out there with magic sauce which can produce a better picture.

This is a difference that has been found by measuring the particulars of a display, not a conjured result from quasi science, but actual results from actual science. This removes it from the non-science based claims of magic wires and processors that can do handstands.

The only question in my mind is whether it is important or not, in particular, is it important enough to make you step up to a player that correctly displays the information being read from the disk or if a 'good enough' player is just that. I have no doubt that you can find reviewers who will be fine with the players that compromise on this, if that is what happened. The reviewers on that site were fine with the Sony until they realized that it was not mapping colors correctly. They then followed it up by saying that a player that does that can cause errors in calibration of displays.

If you want to say that this is something that doesn't matter because having a compressed or incorrect color mapping is not noticeable, that moves the discussion from the actual science to art, the appreciation of something intrinsically rather than on the exact representation of a bluray disk movie as it was meant to be displayed. In that case, anyone's opinion counts, not just reviewers.

link in op is dead/ error 404 not found

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/technical-articles/technical-topics/blu-ray-player-hdmi-benchmark-introduction.html

We don't know if this is the case or not, we said that could be a possibility. We took the S570, and S580, and did a full reset on them (with review units you never know what's been done with them before) and then ran them. We got the strange results we reported so we reset them again, checked the main menu settings, and retested. The default for all our results are what you get with a unit straight out-of-the-box, as that's how the majority of people are likely to use them. If Sony addressed this through a firmware upgrade, so it didn't default to an incorrect picture mode, that's fine, but I don't know if they did or not. It also wouldn't change that people would open the box, hook it up, and have a badly skewed image and possibly never know it, or wonder why it seems so dim and flat.

If I may put in my two cents, I've used a Panasonic BD50 since September of 2008 to drive a Panasonic PT-AE2000 1080p LCD projector. As my AVR is pre-HDMI, I use six analog cables to make a 5.1 connection to the analog input of the AVR.

Also had a Denon 2910 in the system, which played DVD-Audio disks and SACDs, with its audio hooked up the same way, using a passive switchbox to share the amp's 5.1 input between the two.

Always loved the image from the BD50, but began to realize that the audio from the 2910 was richer when I did comparisons on the sound from CDs and DVDs, which both could play.

So I sprang for an Oppo BDP-93 to improve the sound from Blu-rays. I didn't expect an improvement in the image, but after an evening of re-calibration with Digital Video Essentials' Blu-ray version, I put on a movie and it was like I had washed the windshield of my car.

I project an image 9 1/2 feet wide and sit 10 feet away, so the difference may be more obvious to me than to someone using a smaller screen, but it's not subtle.

Even older films look brand new again.

Thank you for the clarification. What I recalled was that your article/comment stating that there was something wonky about S570 not being in "standard" mode.

the article is down. does anyone know where it has been moved to?

Sorry, they were moved here:

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/secrets-blu-ray-player-hdmi-benchmark/secrets-blu-ray-player-hdmi-benchmark.html

There was a reorganization of the site and apparently some links aren't redirecting correctly still.