Official 2012 Sony BDP-S790 Thread - Page 47

All Blu-ray disks that originate from video sources (TV) are most likely 1080i and do need to be deinterlaced. If that's the case then the S570 must have been introducing error where none existed in the data coming from the Blu-ray disk, or there were image enhancement features engaged that shouldn't have been engaged. The secret is to do nothing to Blu-ray sources. An inexpensive player that does nothing is just as good as a more expensive player that also does nothing when playing Blu-ray. [/quote]

Oh the S570 had and still has a fine Blu Ray picture. But the Direct mode feature on the S790 gives a somewhat to my eyes a better viewing experience. On the S570 there was only Standard, Bright or Theatre modes. I engaged it on Standard which may have added enhancements without my knowledge.

But you are absolutely right.Blu Ray is Blu Ray. As in what is on the disc is what is on the screen if no enhancements are added. Sadly with DVD players, the same cannot be said.

In an ideal world I would not be using DVD discs anymore. But so many films I enjoy have not been released on Blu Ray and will by now probably not get released in the formats lifetime. And some Blu Ray transfers are sadly sometimes worse than the previous DVD version.

A film like Bram Stoker's Dracula which has so many bad digital artifacts present on the Blu Ray Disc makes the Blu Ray upgrade pointless. Plus the black crush in the picture makes it unenjoyable to watch. And I doubt we will get another Blu Ray version of the film akin to the DVD of the late 1990's in terms of colour and look.

Finally I can watch it compression free on DVD with the S790 and get a close to Blu Ray quality. I always hated compression artifacts on a DVD especially noticeable on dark scenes.

I also get no picture if I connect directly to a sony vw90 projector, but throu my denon dvp-602 the picture shows fine to the projector.

I had the S790 and Panny BDP500 in my rack at the the same time. With all video controls zeroed on both players the Sony was noticeably superior at DVD upconversion to my eyes. This was one of the primary reasons that I kept the S790 and returned the Panasonic.

The studios want you to watch all of their previews and the anti-piracy warnings, so no -- if you play from disc. That's one of the reasons why many people copy BDs to computer disk storage and play from there. Of course, the studios don't like that, which is one reason they're starting to use Cinevia.
This sounds like the player is putting out a signal that's incompatible with the projector. Maybe it's the refresh rate. Does the receiver have a rescaling enabled? Have you tried setting the player to always output 1080p60 , for example, just to see if it works? Maybe the amplitude of the signal coming out from the player is just too low. Unfortunately, there wouldn't be a setting to adjust that.

Unless the authoring on the disc itself prevents it, the S790 will skip the junk and go straight to the disc menu by pressing the "Top Menu" button on the remote.

Not true. I'm rented plenty of 3D movies on VUDU that I either hadn't seen yet and wasn't sure I would want to buy on Blu-Ray 3D or 3D movie's I knew I'd never want to buy on Blu-Ray 3D but wanted to see at least once.

Hi! No, I haven´t tryed more than 1080p24. the processor is on passthrou, only adding noise reduction from the realtachip. It doesn´t matter for me since I will be running throu the vp anyway. I need the subtitle shift from the oppo. If it is a weak signal maby they can correct it in firmware...

I have been testing the BDP S790 against the current Panasonic DMP BDT550 and must say the BluRay quality and DVD upconversion are far superior on the 790 compared to the 2012 Panasonic models hands down no contest. I am extremely happy with
the Sony 790.

Has anyone figured out what "Auto" does in the picture quality adjustment options? It definitely is doing some kind of subtle enhancement. Love this machine; best DVD upconversion I've seen, and I never thought Blu-rays would look better too, but they do. So glad I finally retired my Panny BD-35 to the basement.

I am quite skeptical about the claims of DVD upconvert superiority on the sony. I've owned two sony's: the 185 and 590, and DVD's on both players have that typical soft, washed out colours SD look. I much prefer the DVD upconvert on the panny 220.

My skepticism stems from numerous reports of "superiority" that I consider implausible, impossible, or were simply disconfirmed by my own testing.

Krayg, I am speculating, but I would guess that "auto" runs a little hot, boosting color or contrast. I used to run my monitor like this out of the box. It looked good to me at first, but I knew right away that colors were exaggerated. So, a guess is that you're getting lots of hot colors at the cost of some detail.

I htink smackrabbit has done some testing, check out some of his previous posts in this thread.

With all due respect but having been a previous Sony owner of two Blu Ray players, the DVD upconversion is better. I see a more refined DVD picture than before and no compression artifacts. I know the S570 had a softer DVD picture and had I not noticed a difference with the Sony S790, I would of asked for my money back.

If the S790 has the capability to upscale to 4K resolution then it is not a stretch of the imagination that a DVD will look better. Colours do not look washed out as in subdued . In fact other experts here have testified that the DVD upconversion is "darn good" and as good as the Oppo if not even better.

Then be happy with the Panny and try to resist justifiying the choice in your own mind by taking a swipe at those of us who think otherwise.

All I can tell you is that I had the BDP500 and S790 side-by-side for two weeks. I compared them ad nauseum. The Sony was superior at SD DVD upconversion to my eyes.

....shopping for best price on a 790....

John,

The upconversion is much better on this player.

I'm going to troll you guys forever if the dvd upconversion is not as good as you guys say. Not really, but I hope I don't get my hopes dashed when I set this player up. Meaning, If it works out (and I'm still quite skeptical that it will), then this could be as close as we can get to an 'ideal player' at this stage of the game. That is, it's got pretty much every key feature I'm looking for:

1. great BR PQ

2. great DVD upconvert

3. excellent file support

4. 1080 hd netflix support.

The only thing I probably won't like is the ergonomically unfriendly, chubby remote.

Where's smackrabbit when you need him to tell me that the panny 220 and sony 590 are bit perfect and that I shouldn't expect to see any improvement in BR PQ as some have suggested???

The Remote for the 790 is Bigger than the remotes for the 390/590. Much prefer the 790 remote. May pick up 2 more to sub out my 2 590 remotes.

Get a Harmony One.

To me the next 'big thing' is going to be 4K BD players to handle 4K BluRay disks that should begin to show up within a yr or so.   Until then I think the differences between the various good BD players (Oppo, Sony, Panny) is minimal.

With the current world economy being rather in poor shape, I do not see any possibility of a new 4K Blu Ray format emerging in even the next two years with exclusive 4K titles. Considering that DVD still outsells Blu Ray discs despite the massive price drop speaks volumes to the studios. And what is amazing is that even though Blu Ray has 5 times the picture quality of a DVD, the general consumer has not been as swayed as originally predicted by the industry. In 2008, they predicted that Blu Ray would outsell DVD in 2011. It never happened and Blu Ray is 6 years into existence.

At best, 4K upscaling Blu Ray players will be the strategy like the S790. Seems logical to me.

For starters you would need a significant amount of 4K display owners to justify a new Blu Ray format. No film studio who are losing money due to piracy as well as economic downturn are going to release films to a niche market. Blu Ray was launched when a lot of HD televisions were sold.

You may certainly be right about the time scale, WarrenD; who knows.   I guess my point was that I see little motivation to replace a good BD player (Oppo83 for me, since I'm not into 3D) until some more significant improvement is in the offing.   Upconversion of 1080p to 4K by the BD player is really of no use since the only consumer 4K projector at present  (the Sony 1000) does this already (and better than the Sony BD player by most accounts).

 

PS   My comments pertain only to PQ; there may be 'features' that a person may be interested in that make an upgrade very reasonable.

Not to split hairs, but your post did mention 4K Blu Ray titles showing up "within a year or so". But not to worry.

But it is true that picture difference between Blu Ray players will be so minimal. And the iimprovements will be more towards the quality of the 3D picture which to me is of no interest. I see 3D as a gimmick to charge more at the cinema. Even when Francis Ford Coppola made Twixt he mentioned that the glasses are a distraction and should only be used for a few scenes which I agree with.

But DVD upscaling like with the S790 is from my perspective the most enticing aspect of the motivation to purchase. Because I dislike revisionist transfers which seem to be fashionable with some studios as regards Blu Ray.

Believe me, I would love there to be a 4K Blu Ray format but they would have to make DVD no longer available for it to take off. DVD only took off because they phased out VHS. And Blu Ray would have taken off far quicker had the DVD been totally taken off the market. I saw my brother in law buy a DVD movie over a Blu Ray because the DVD was £1 cheaper. Incredible. And he knows Blu Ray is far superior but felt the quality was fine with DVD. And he went ahead with the purchase despite me trying to persuade him to go with the Blu Ray.



But with 4K Blu Ray, what concerns me is how expensive it could be. When Blu Ray came out in the UK, a disc was as expensive as £35. That created a negative consumer perception and strengthened DVD's hold on the market.
Edited by WarrenD - 7/2/12 at 6:41am

 I suppose this is more of a hope than an expectation.

Seriously. You mean to tell me that anyone interested in saving time will transfer a Bluray movie to to a computer? Previews are annoying but there is no way I am going to sit thru a Bluray disc transfer to skip thru a few previews.

Anywho, with the BDP S790 prepare to reset the player ever so often. I am contemplating using a dedicated plug so that I won't have to keep moving stuff out of the way to reset the player. I won't be returning it because the pluses of the player far outweigh the minuses.

Many people seem to enjoy building gigantic file servers and transferring BD, DVD and CD content to servers. For some, actually watching a movie seems to be only a minor part of the entertainment. In most cases "ripping" takes much less time than watching a movie, you don't have to copy anything but the movie and the primary soundtrack and you can go off and do something else while it's happening. Or you can get it from someone else. I agree with you, though. I have too little time available to want to spend it doing things like that.

You guys may not be aware that any reasonably powerful computer and reasonably recent software can multi-process a rip so that, in fact, the user would spend less than two minutes completing the process.

The amount of time that it takes away from other computer related activities may be less than a minute if you don't count putting the shinny disk into the drive, taking it out, and returning it to it's container.

I'm not a collector of any kind, but movie collectors do seem to value more than a one time viewing of films. That's especially true if they are also interested in the history of film. A collector also has a vested interest in protecting their original disks.
Edited by htwaits - 7/2/12 at 11:53am

Less than two minutes to rip a Blu-ray? Really? I find that hard to believe. I can't even rip a SD DVD that fast. The bottleneck in the process is the speed at which the optical drive can read the data off the shiny disc and how fast that data can then be written to a hard drive.

Maybe he has a SUPER-COMPUTER.

I AGREE

Obviously he is referring only to the setup time, not to the transfer time.

Not obvious at all, but you're probably right.

I must not have made myself clear. It's not the first time.

A rip can be started in less than two minutes. During the additional twenty to thirty minutes for a Blu-ray rip to complete, the computer and the human operator can be doing other things, as long as neither of them need to use the optical drive that's reading the shinny disk. For instance, one thing I might do while waiting for a rip to be completed is read and post at AVS.

I would like to have a super computer, but what I do have is a Win 7 system that's a couple years old. It was probably in the top third of the commercial market for speed when it was new. Now it's not so fast, but it can do more than one thing at a time when time is measured from my prospective instead of the computer's perspective.

Enjoy.