Onkyo TX-NR818 "official" owner's thread discussion - Page 129

Someone has already done that and the ultimate 'solution' was that their retailer, who was trying to get it fixed for them, ended up giving them a refund towards purchase of a non Onkyo product because Onkyo could not or would not fix the issue after a period of two months. Similarly Joe Rod told us back in August that Onkyo was aware of this and would hopefully fix it, and now five months later, zilcho.

Unfortunately in an era of low end garbage TVs, various settings that can hide or obscure this type of problem (frame interpolation motion "smoothing", etc) and apathetic customers (have their BD players set by default to 1080P/60), Onkyo can get away with it.

I'm not independantly wealthy or I might consider buying another AVR so I could send this one in and beat Onkyo up about it. Unfortunately I don't have an extra $1500 laying around to play chicken with Onkyo over this, but if someone does then bravo, go for it.

Yes, it is there and it is VERY noticeable. At least on my big-ass plasma that handles 24P properly. I saw the issue both when using my PS3 as a source and when using my HTPC as a source. Switching to the secondary output however bypasses all of the Onkyo processing and circumvents the issue. It's not a great solution, but it is a solution of sorts.

To those who don't notice it, my guess is that they simply are part of the fortunate group who don't notice things like this (they probably don't notice gawdawful 3:2 pulldown judder either) or they have their TV set up for something other than 24P, or they have a TV that hides these types of problems through the use of excessive processing or motion smoothing.

My Panasonic plasma provides a picture that is amazingly film-like when viewing 24P content and sadly the problem is VERY noticeable. I would expect it is quite noticeable on 24P projectors also.

I was the first person in this thread who pointed this problem out and lots of hecklers insisted that the problem was not present... however testing done by another member using a lumigen processor PROVES that it has this problem... so if you notice things like dupe/dropped frames, then avoid the 818.

Then either you simply don't observe the problem (hard to believe if you are as annoyed by artifacts as you say), or your unit is different than others (possible but not likely), or, your combination of settings on your display equipment and the Onkyo do not produce the problem.

All I'm going to say is that at least one person who conversed with me about this over PM, and who will remain nameless, did not in fact have their gear set up for 24P, it was displaying at 60 fps. After spending oodles of time helping them get their gear setup they reported that they saw the picture "glitch" but that it didn't really bother them.

Le Sigh.

As a result, I'm not interested in spending my own valuable time trying to "prove" the problem is there when I already know it is.

Set your PS3 for 1080P/24 and then you should see on your VP that the output of the signal from the 818 Main is 24.00 not 23.976 as it should be.

You are correct, using the sub-out is a workaround, you don't only lose the OSD, you loose all of the fancy video processing that you MIGHT want to use for other input sources like a STB, game machine, etc.

The most likely variable, other than equipment settings (not really doing 24P from the 818 with a valid source and to a TV set to display a 24P multiple frame-rate) is differences in how different people perceive this kind of thing... which, unfortunately, is not something that can be quantifiably measured.

As bob mentions, your TV almost definitely supports both 24.00 and 23.976.

The problem would not be because of your TV, the problem would be that when playing a BD source which in the north american market is sent at 23.976, the Onkyo would convert this to 24.00 and in doing so you end up with duplicated frames every ~40 seconds.

The whole 23.976 thing is moronic anyway. They should have made a clean break with this NTSC bull when the BD format was launched. 24.00 and 60.00 is all it ever should have supported... then we wouldn't be dealing with this kind of bologna.