First, Quick Impression - BR Surprisingly good! - Page 3  

If I can find the time to compare these formats using my own equipment since I have the Superbit and the 1080i .ts version. I can speculate that Blu-ray will get an advantage over macroblocking artifacts compared to .ts.

That's what I thought after 15 minutes as well. In my initial review I felt both BD and HD DVD were in the same league PQ wise (slight edge to HD DVD for the better titles). However, as I watched entire titles I started seeing that there was a lack of detail in facial areas, the sharpness was inconsistent and camera pans tended to have judders. In the case of TFE, my upconverted Superbit looks almost as good as the BD most of the time. Certain scenes in BD are better. My decision at this point based on watching all available BD disks (except 50 First Dates) is that BD does not justify the premium (for me at least) and IMHO FMJ and Firewall are superior PQ-wise to any BD I have watched so far. However, this is just my opinion. When I got the Samsung I (unlike others) was expecting a somewhat inferior product since I knew Sony was limited to mpeg-2 on 25 GB disks. However, even then I was disappointed with the outcome...

On my display most of TFE looked grainy and soft (some scenes looked sharp). Did you get the chance to see the entire movie? I have probably spent more time with TFE than with any other BD title since I had both the Superbit and BD versions and I was using it as one of the tests to determine if I should keep the player. Anyway, your combination of display and samsung player looks like is working out pretty well. If you liked TFE, Terminator is much better and will probably exceed in PQ any HD DVD. For me, TFE looked like good upconverted DVD for most of the film, while Terminator looked mostly HD.

It'll be interesting to see how consumers will decide which format looks better. I have invited people to my home to do A-B comparisons, but that is clearly not a scalable solution :D

Hey I am relatively new to posting on this form but have read it a lot. I really do respect the folks out there who are more tech astute than me and have learned a lot about set up products etc thanks. When I bought the Tosh I really followed the form. I loved it from first day reall with all the quirks It gave me flawless performance mechanically from the beginning. Do not mind load time etc. I have 27 HD flicks and most are super. Based on this I decided to order the Sammy very early on. When I got it I got my first films last Tuesday at BB. The first I watched was Flying daggers it was mediocre, grainy a little softer than HD but still looked like an HD disc. I was somewhat dissapointed and a little nervous about keeping is base on all the negatives I started to read about here. I spoke with Samsung and felt a bit reasured. Finally I decided to open some more of my software. Watched Underworld Evolution and was shocked at how good it looked and rather pleased. I than took the big jump and opened TFE, Wow I guess PQ is subjective. I saw no grain, not one artifact it looked amazing. I am now sure ay PQ problems are software not hardwqre oriented. I am definately keeping both and just going to enjoy the movies. My Projector is 720: and My CRT TV is 1080i. Both look great. My Screen is a 119" high contrast cinema vision with horizontal Masque. I will give a slight edge to the HD-DVD but am sure when they start to improve the uniformity on reproduction Blu will probably be superior. So for not I have my own version od a combo. Could be running both at 1080i and letting Panny downconvert helps or it just does not highlight the software problems, Just love both.

I have a decently calibrated Pansonic 50 inch commercial plasma (8UK). On my display, BD movies look decidedly more grainly with less facial details than HD DVD. If you like the way BD looks and seems superior or equal to BD then I am not going to debate your observation and perhaps others should consider your data point as well before giving a thumbs-down.

As a case in point, when people were complaining about the Toshiba's locking up and freezing, I thought since I had a perfect player with zero glitches that it was being exaggerated. But since I didn't experience the pain, it was hard for me to reconcile others experience with mine. As of now, based on my personal experience I believe that the current BD releases are not a good as HD DVD. In my opinion, the PQ is not close and not even in the same league. Down the road this may change and BD may get better or it may start looking better to me. Who knows. But it is what it is, and like you I say it like I see it.

I haven't watched either Terminator or TFE on HBO HD to comment on it. HBO HD here looks like DVD upconverted (mostly) and therefore similar to the worse BD titles like Hitch and House of Flying Dagger (in general), but worse than any HD DVD and better BD titles (only Terminator comes to mind for now).

William, I am with you in that the problem is not hardware related and software. I am convinced that BD will put put better content....I do hold the Samsung to a higher standard since it costs more!

my 2 cents...

thrang

Wonderful thread. I just read the whole thing, and i knew from the start that a lot of people just want BR gone in fear of having a 500 dollar paperweight, so i didnt beleive a lot of the reviews as well. You arent the first person ive seen say T5E looks good, and the amazing backlash of it is now truely comming into light. Thanks also to the other posters who've seen how good BR actually looks. I still have to go see BR in action, been so busy havent had a chance to go see for myself. But again, i enjoyed everything you've wrote and please, post those pics up!

blitz, two questions for you:

1. Do you believe BD looks better than HD DVD, similar or worse (overall)?

2. Do you believe BD players justify the 2X price difference?

IMHO if the Samsung cost $500, we would not be having all this debate (or at least not so much of it). I would have a really really hard time recommending BD over HD DVD right now. I would feel like I cheated someone if I did that.

My point is not that BD sucks or HD DVD is nirvana ten times over. No. All I am saying is that HD DVD is the better value. Better picture for lower price (and similar number of available movies over the next several months at least). Most of the initial BD titles I watched underwhelmed me, perhaps because I am used to HD DVD now. Perhaps if I was comparing BD to DVD I would be blown away, but I am comparing it to HD DVD and so I am not. When I purchased HD DVD, the benchmark was DVD and HD DVD was a huge improvement. I considered the money well spent (even my wife agreed :D ). The Samsung isn't bad. I have never said it is, but is it worth $1,000? It's your money....

My only recommendation is not to buy into hype - whether it comes from the BDA or HD DVD promo group. Rather make up your mind based on what is tangible and real....

I think that part of the problem here has to do with the quality of the initial releases. From what I can gather (I have not seen released BD yet...just a demo from Sony 2 years ago), the best looking of the BD titles look to be on par with some of HD-DVD's worst releases - not a good strategy when introducing a new product. As a result, many people are judging BD based on a quality level that may or may not be as good as it gets (We won't know until they actually release their first "stunning" title). The BluRay camp really should have released some "stunners" initially in order to get all of the early adopters to drop their jaws, but this does not seem to be the case. Even the people who are now coming out are saying things more like "It wasn't anywhere near as bad as I expected", rather than "Oh my God, this is the finest looking HD I have ever seen, bar none!!!"

As far as The Fifth Element is concerned, that particular title has represented a standard of excellence which is used to measure the quality of hardware for many years now, so expectations of that title were extremely high. Sony really needed to pull out all the stops and present this one title as well as possible, as they must have known that it would be scrutinized more closely than anything else released. Apparently they didn't do that...:(

The best titles I've seen on HD-DVD to date were Serenity, Assault on Precinct 13 (just last night), and The Chronicles of Riddick (I bought that one). When I start hearing experienced and unbiased members with >100" large screens (no offense intended to the newbies and/or those with rear projectors) tell me that they have seen titles that are up to that level of picture quality, then I will gladly run out and buy a BD player and some software. But comparing the current BD titles to the worst HD-DVD titles (like The Fugitive, which I am really glad I rented instead of buying...:) ) just doesn't mean a heck of a lot to me. I can get that kind of quality capturing OTA and sat HD myself.

My only viewing of any BD was FE at Best Buy on a Sammy DLP, I watched almost 20 minutes. Some very noticeable artifacts, and softer than most HD-DVD I've seen, but again, different titles on a different display, I have a Sony 60" SXRD. There's no way I'd pay $1k for what I saw at BB that day.

It's not as though I have a ton of posts, or that I've been on this board forever, but I do find it interesting that the glowing reviews for Blu-Ray tend to come from people who just joined and have very few posts.

I wish there were a "content explosion" where as consumers, we'd be pleasantly surprised to know that many titles have been ready to go and just suddenly released in one week. That would be great, because my A1 is content-starved. I find myself watching movies I'm not interested in and wouldn't watch otherwise (like Syriana or Serenity), just to be amazed by the HD experience.

If there were such "an explosion" of readily available content, I'd look back at BD much more closely. If a lot of the movies were the "must have's" I'd try to view them somehow (watch at BB, hook up with someone I know who has them), and read the reviews of them here. And if they weren't as bad as this first crop, I'd absolutely consider buying a BD player.

Since this is hardly the case, I'm going to hold off, and am hoping that 3 things happen:

1) they get much better transfers (I don't care if it's dual layer or different encoding that makes this happen)
2) the success of the Tosh players and HD-DVD as a whole forces camp Blu-Ray to rethink their pricing on players
3) significantly more titles jump out around the holidays

Yeah, I'm dreaming, I know but this is a position we, the consumers, have been put in. :mad:

My only point is that you cant give credit when one title is clearly the best of the worst.

I have to agree with you about TFE. I just happen to have a DVHS recording of TFE that I taped off of the HBO/East feed via C-Band. This was directly off of the very transponder that E*, D*, and Cable get their signal to rebroadcast.

I watched it again last night in its entirety. With that in mind, here is my opinion of it:

It is a very good transfer for an older movie. I see no banding in the opening scene. I do not see one instance of macro-blocking throughout the movie. If it is there, I missed it last night. I do see film grain evident, but according to several reviews, this is also on the Master.

This movie is actually quite detailed, but there is an effect being used that may lead some to think that certain scenes are soft. This occurs throughout the movie. For certain there are scenes which "look soft", but when a camera pans or zooms in on an object in that scene, razor sharp detail explodes onto the screen. An example is when Dallas is in his apartment. The off-white (read somewhat in need of cleaning) color of the walls gives the perception of a soft image.

As the camera pans to the entry door of the apartment, one can see a video terminal above a control panel to the left of the door. The clarity of the black smudgy dirt surrounding all three buttons below the video screen stands in stark contrast to the scene before where surface texture and shading on the off-white wall was about all of the detail offered (and this led to the scene having a soft appearance). In the scene where the Chinese Junk vender is serving Dallas , when panning into the apartment with its off-white walls and out of focus rear wall, gives the appearance of a soft scene. When the Camera switches back to the Chef giving his dialogue, the detail of his Junk, the cooking utensils and his clothes etc scream razor sharp detail. The scene where TFE is looking down through layers of floating traffic pops 3D as much as any scene could.

I first noticed film grain in the third scene I believe, where the desert scene is framed against a clear blue sky. This is where the two little boys are working for the gentleman drawing hieroglyphs. The blue sky is full of film grain, but this is part of the film itself. I looked for, but did not see any dirt or dust specs, or any obvious scratches. The closest it comes was the stars flickering against a night sky, but hey stars twinkle. :-) Detail of the carvings being deciphered is absolutely jaw-dropping.

The detail in the four stones, the surrounding Hieroglyphs, and texture of the stone walls inside the temple are magnificent. The fact is that in some scenes a certain female's anatomy berides evidence that the studio must have been kept very chilly indeed!

There is so much humor hidden in this movie, and one example is where the Priest is walking into Dallas's apartment and calls Dallas "Mr. Willis". Bruce never skips a beat and responds, "It's Dallas". Bruce surely knows how to deliver a line.

I have not watched the BluRay version of TFE yet (BB demo with little time to spend watching it) does not give me enough info to make comment yet.


TFE is not the best transfer of film that I have in my Library. It is a very enjoyable Hi-Def experience, but visually it is in the upper-middle of the pack when compared to certain D-Theater and HBO/Starz C-Band offerings.

I thought maybe some might find my opinion of this HBO offering interesting. If not; I am sorry for wasting the bandwidth.

Ray

What are those "thumbnails" supposed to show us? 800 pixels wide :rolleyes:

But these will keep me busy. I'll grab those frames from the HBO version and post them

First, let me say Ray that this was a great post. Good observation of what is going on. And part of the problem of using MPEG-2 for HD. Let me explain.

MPEG-2 simply does not have the efficiency for the application being used. That is, even ATSC at 19 Mbit/sec (CBR) does not have enough headroom to allow difficult camera pans to be reproduced artifact free or even close to it. MPEG-2 doesn't really become transparent until you are well into 30+ Mbit/sec.

So the encoder companies have become clever. They add preprocessing to make the video good, especially since some broadcasters go well below 19 Mbit/sec for HD. The most typical "trick" is to employ temporal filtering. This is where the encoder uses the feedback from the MPEG-2 codec, telling it that it is starving for bits. The encoder then starts to pre-filter the video before compression proportional to how bad the situation is. Reduction of detail means that there is less to preserve in MPEG-2 and we wind up trading resolution for compression artifacts -- a decent trade off in this situation.

Now, in real-time situation, one is desperate and techniques like above are valid and useful. What is surprising is to see them in optical formats. Here, we want the quality to be well above broadcast. So employing this kind of filtering is a bad idea. Indeed, when I look at BD, I see this resolution pumping effect in many places which is surprising. It causes people to comment on inconsistent quality of BD titles.

The goal for optical formats is to have constant video quality given the fact that we can use variable rate coding. But VBR is not a panacea. If the content stays difficult for more than brief periods, then it loses its effect and then overall bitrate and efficiency of the codec become the dominant determinants of picture quality. And this is where the problem appears to be.

Having said all of this, it is still puzzling what the Sony encoder is doing. It seems to employ various techniques to deal with bit starvation but it is losing to standard encoders used by Harmonic/Tandberg in real-time HD. The latter companies spend a lot of energy optimizing for these situations. It seems that Sony lacks this experience and is optimizing poorly here. The JVC D-VHS encoder is not perfect either, but I think they have striked a better balance between resolution and compression artifacts (D-VHS is not transparent to original no matter what people say – just talk to Joe Kane). Indeed, I find little to complain about D-VHS whereas BD is another case altogether….

Here is a link of TFE as captured on a 480p panny plasma and SD DVD. Interesting comparison to say the least. I got this off of AVS member Rich Harkness's sig. This was what came up based on my search of TFE screenshot :p

The following link is of screenshots of SD DVD version of The Fifth Element not the BD version:

http://www.pbase.com/chunkofunk/fifth_element

I report, you decide.

Having only seen HD-DVD (serenity on a 42" Westy @ BB) and not seen BR yet, i cannot make a decision on it. However, i was truely unimpressed with what i saw of serenity. Ive been watching HD feeds off of sat for a while, so this didnt blow me away. Not sure why everyone thinks it should. Perhaps because ive been pre-exoposed to it all, it doesnt wow me like it should. Also, ive never seen so much grain in my entire film viewing life. It disgusted me.

No. Why? PS3. Same price for the component version, 100 more for HDMI 1.3. Lets re-state that. HDMI 1.3. 1080p True native res. And it plays games and upconverts to 1080p. I personally wouldnt spend 1k on any stand alone player of ANY kind. I also would not spend 499 on a format i dont beleive will become the De Facto standard. Which is why im using my $$$ to show what i want and not what ill settle for.

If someone wants a HD format right now, and cannot wait for a PS3, i would recommend the Samsung for them. I just couldnt in all good faith recomment the tosh which has an uphill battle vs sony just having to be out there for it to win. This is all my OPINION. Im not stating it as fact. I sincerely hope people dont get their pantys in a bunch, but im sure a lot will considering the fact that theres a good chance they're going to be the owners of $500 shelf partners with D-VHS.

Is HD-DVD the better value? If you look at the terms of the situation as it is today. Yes. I however always think about whats going to happen. In that way, i see the tosh as a good CONSUMER value, however, it is not a sound investment in my eyes. If you also beleive that most people walking into a store, buying a 1080p HDTV for the first time have seen HD-DVD in their homes on a calibrated set to notice the 10% difference, id say you'd be insanely wrong. HD-DVD owners arent on the radar. DVD owners are. If said strategy of pushing Blu-Ray works, they take it home and watch their first HD flick. Beleive me, they will be blown away. They will not say "Wow, this looks nice, but i bet that HD-DVD that only outputs to 1080i looks better! Lets try that too!". Not going to happen. You are representing .001% of people who will be seeing Blu-Ray. Just because you like the 10% difference (which is just temporary imo, different codecs and more space on the BR WILL have superior IQ. If you think otherwise, you need to wake up, neo), doesnt mean anyone else will know it exists.

If you live in the absolute now, i agree. However, i know im going to own a PS3. I know im going to buy a 1080p set next year. I know sony will never allow BR to fail and do whatever tactics it takes to ensure victory. Theres WAY too much $$$ at stake in the home movie industry to risk it. Do i really care how sony does it? No. I know i want my movies to be in BR, i want my next gen storage medium to be BR, and im a tech geek, so i will back the superior format. Just because its 10% not as good now, doesnt mean squat to me.

Again, i love a good debate, reply without the fury/hatred that most HD-DVD Owners have =)

Have you actually compared them? If not, I wonder about your motivation. A group of us (including a couple of people who many around here would consider video experts or close to it) compared the HBO-HD version of T5E playing in the HD DVD player to the BD playing in the BluRay player to the same input on a 1080p Sony Ruby (VW100). There was nobody there who didn't think the HBO version looked better. For instance, there was quite a bit of detail missing in faces with the BD version.

If you've actually seen both versions of T5E and compared them I would like to hear why you believe the BD version is clearly superior and if you haven't then I wonder why you made that statement.

--Darin

The rest of your post was pointless after that....

yeah, what's next.....I'll believe it when I see it. However, BD fanboys like yourself don't let reality get in the way apparently. After all you haven't even seen BD. What a joke (IMHO).

I sense Sony is sending their minions upon this forum now in full force for some creative damage control. That's the only way I can explain comments like yours :eek:

Yep, there are lots of HD-DVD trolls here now.

Blu-Ray looks good. I have 16 HD-DVD's and all the Blu-Ray releases so far. Heck, I even have a HD-DVD laptop as well. Blu-Ray looks on par with HD-DVD. I have seen nothing on Blu-Ray that looks as bad as Full Metal Jacket on HD-DVD. Are we condeming the entire format becuase of that movie? No, of course not. People here are exagerating the lack of picture quality, for various reasons.

I love both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Neither is crap.

The question is if BD is worth the premium right now over HD DVD? The consensus is that HD DVD has the better PQ for lower price. I thought HD DVD was supposed to be the Honda and BD the Acura (at least based on the premium). But it turns out that BD performs more like a Hyundai. No one is saying that you should not buy a Hyundai (they make good cars as well), but as long as you know it isn't an Acura....I guess that is what it boils down to.

Perhaps the best BD in your display is better than the best HD DVD, for most it doesn't appear that way....there may be a disconnect. I bought the Samsung and I'm sure I'll buy a good universal player if it came along.

I still believe that BD has the potential to be the better format, but as they say, you gotta show up to play....

So would blitz be a BD troll for saying that he was 'disgusted' by Serenity. I guess not. It's all a matter of perspective ;)

Then there must be something wrong with your display. SERENITY looks beautiful on HD DVD.

I do agree that Blu Ray is not crap, but it does not compare to HD DVD at this time. It may in the future, but anything else is clearly misleading. You may not notice the difference and that is perfectly fine, but there is a difference that ranges from small to major dependin upon the disc.

Just because you cant tell the difference does not mean that there isnt a difference. For example, audio. I am not an audio person. If you played me CD and SACD I may not be able to tell, but clearly to the audio experts one sounds better. Same logic applies here.

The collective wisdom of those involved in this viewing and the findings that resulted are, for me, difficult to ignore. I was admittedly surprised by what I saw yesterday (BR better than my first viewing), but I need a higher level of consistency between disks to justify my support of the format. I'm still hopeful that improvements will be forthcoming.

Here we go. All 30 frames captured from the HBO HD version.

http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/7...080p9ii.th.jpghttp://img466.imageshack.us/img466/2...080p0uz.th.jpghttp://img466.imageshack.us/img466/4...080p5rc.th.jpghttp://img487.imageshack.us/img487/6...080p5ct.th.jpghttp://img487.imageshack.us/img487/4...080p1wc.th.jpghttp://img352.imageshack.us/img352/6...080p8ta.th.jpg