New DVDO iScan VP50 - Page 3

aaronwt,

add a switcher, there are plenty of IR controllers that will do it properly. Adding more than 4 HDMI inputs means that they'll have to either lose a few other inputs (and we need them all) or that the price will go up because they'll need to add more boards (a second level).

stacey,

Just learned that the whole 6 episodes will be shown in hd pretty soon. I guess that means I can finally throw out the DVDs and move on to 1080i for all 6 episodes (at least until they come out in a physical format).

In which format?

I'm using the VP30/ABT102 with a 60" SXRD (XBR1) and love this setup. Picture quality is top notch on both SD and HD. I'm very interested in the added features of the VP50, but am not sure I can take full advantage of them in my setup.

The XBR1 is a 1080p set, but only accepts 720p/1080i inputs. The internal deinterlacer is quite good, from what I can tell anyway.

My question involves how the VP50 handles HD. Ideally what would work best for me would for the VP50 to deinterlace a 1080i input and perform all it's processing on the signal, then re-interlace it back to 1080i cleanly such that my XBR1 won't add any (or at least minimal) artifacts to the image.

It's my understanding that the Gennum processor in Anthem's D2 handles 1080i in this fashion. Some clarity on the VP50's signal chain would be extremely helpful.

Thanks!

I believe he's referring to the upcoming Cinemax-HD broadcasts.

Josh
When does it ship?

PerS
Norway

how would this scaler be useful if you have a 1080p display like the Pioneer PRO-FHD1 that already accepts and upconverts and scales all signals to 1080p? Would the VP50 give you a better picture?

He said earlier in the thread...Sept 06

westy I would be willing to bet that the DVDO would beat any internal 1080i DI in any TV in the world, except maybe those with HQV, it could be even better than HQV, time will tell, this is going to be a fun Fall

-Gary

$2,999 msrp.

If this set accepts 1080p and passes it through unprocessed, then "yes" the VP50 could improve the picture. If not, then no.

This doesn't make any sense to me. There would be absolutely no advantage to deinterlacing a signal only to re-interlace it again.

For sets like this I would have the VP30 output 720p and then leave your display to scale it up to 1080. This way all of the deinterlacing is done by the processor.

bobloblaw: Regarding having a video processor convert 1080i to 1080p, then send clean 1080i/60 to your XBR1 display, that doesnt ever work, simply because the processor in the xbr1 won't know to do a simple weave on the 1080i/60 input to create a progressive image. it's either going to assume its regular interlaced video, or think its film.

The best you can do when you have a 1080i/60 source signal with a 1080p display that wont accept a 1080p signal is to send the 1080i/60 into the display and let it deinterlace it. If you start with 480i you should go the 720p route, to let the Video Processor do its superior deinterlacing, but for 1080i if you output 720p you will lose resolution and that in itself creates artifacts that can be annoying.

I played with this for a while on my Qualia 004 before it could accept 1080p/60 and ended up just going with the upgrade to allow it to accept 1080p/60 and 1080p/50.

In your case the best results you will obtain is to let the Video processor do very little processing (probably just color correction if possible) on the 1080i signal and send it as 1080i to the display. For 480i, 480p and 720p input, have the video processor send 720p to your display, then you will get the full processor benefit (the XBR1 can scale a 720p signal to 1080p without doing much processing or causing any errors). But for 1080i input you are kind of stuck to using the tv's internal deinterlacer.

Josh. Congratulations on your new title and job responsibilities.

In case the posters here didn't know, it is my understanding that Josh is the Product Manager for the VP50. What features it has etc etc. And he has obviously listened to our product requests. Now he couldn't give everyone everything they wanted, but wow, what he gave us.

Ofer is correct. If you need more HDMI out, add a switcher.

Other things will come too, but a good project manager can't make promises ahead of engineering and product development and then is limited by what the bean counters authorize for him to give away as downloadable upgrades.
.
So let;s not beat him to death, OK maybe a little love slap now and then to keep him on his toes, but no bitch slapping..

Thanks for the response Tom and uzun.

Tom: I realize my question may not make sense. My thought was that if the VP50 could de-interlace the 1080i source and in the process clean up some of the artifacts, then re-interlace the signal without those artifacts in the end I would end up with a cleaner picture. Perhaps my thinking here is wrong. Converting all signals to 720p would work, but I'd rather not loose resolution on 1080i sources.

uzun: Thanks for the info, your experience with the Qualia is helpful. I wish my XBR1 could be updated to accept 1080p inputs. Your idea about sending SD and 720p signals to the display as 720p, but leave 1080i alone is a good one. Even better if I can configure the VP50 to do this on it's own without the need to switch between presets manually.

In the end, if I'm only getting the benefit of the VP50 on 720p and not 1080i it's probably not worth the money to upgrade considering I'm very satisfied with the video performance of the VP30 (DVDO, just get those audio dropouts fixed!)

Again, thanks for the help guys. This forum is great.

Josh,
Since there seems to be a relationship between DVDO and JVC, has the V50 been tested with JVC's DLA-HD10K @ 48Hz? If so, any judder?

bobloblaw : a costly solution (probably no more than the qualia upgrade though), and one that will give you what you want is to sell the XBR1, and buy an XBR2 when they come out in a few weeks. Then trade in your VP30 for a VP50. You will get the benefits of the newer model display (brighter bulb, accepts 1080p etc) along with the new video processor. You can then just send 1080/60P for everything, or if the set will accept it and adjust its on screen refresh rate accordingly, you could even try 1080/48P for film based material out of the VP50 and see how that works. The XBR2 might not like 1080/48P however, I'm not sure what it does with it even if it does accept it.

Regardless you would be able to send 1080/60P and get the results you are after, although it is a somewhat costly proposition.

Josh,
Earlier in the thread you were asked about noise reduction and you gave a somewhat cryptic answer about not commenting directly about your product roadmap but that you gave some hints elsewhere in your answers. Could you elaborate at all on what you meant by this? Are there noise reduction algorithms in the VP50 or are you planning on some sort of an add-on module for the VP-50 or a completely separate product?
TIA.

It seems to send 480i/576i or 1080i50/60 YCbCr 8bit 4:4:4 over DVI "without infoframe". Not sure what the "infoframe" stuff means. Does the VP50 accept this?

For those of us that may not be Mensa AV folks could a simple answer be provided that impacts the flood of 1080P input TV's now arriving with more to come.

I'm confused as to the analysis of the XBR1 above or lets say any new 1080P panel. Lets say you have the XBR1 or a new XBR2 that does 1080P.

Are you saying it's a waste to add a VP50 for HD processing?

Before folks fork over $3K they should have an upfront understanding of how this VP will impact a 1080P input TV that is already 1080P. Yes, I understand it will improve SD and that should be a given on that model but what about 1080P - is the VP50 going to outperform the built in 1080P processing or better put 1080i to 1080P? Bottom line no one should spend $3K without knowing this first. Spec sheets in page one look impressive but a simplistic approach to anyone buying a brand new panel with 1080P inputs what it brings to the table for $3,000 besides SD as I'm confused by the above response on the XBR1 - it seems the responder felt the TV would do a better job? Then why bother with a VP50?

Are we as consumers wasting that extra money for the HD processing if we have a 1080P panel?

I'm preparing to upgrade to a 60"-70" 1080P panel and I already have a new VP30 w/ADT102 unused as of yet as it's being saved for my next larger TV since my Sharp doesn't need alot of help IMO and now I'm looking at an upgrade for the large TV but need to know before considering the upgrade program and yet more money.

Often many members in the RPTV and the PDP/LCD threads have questons on tweaking PQ and if ths helps we could help spread the word on the VP50 or others over there where I spend most of my time but I want to have credibility behind the recommendation if someones spending $4-$10K on a new panel with HD DVD or BD that a VP50 would take it to yet another level.

Thank you.

NO.

The situation is rather complex. Let me give you a few reasons why the VP50 still makes sense even if you have a 1080p display which accepts 1080p:

(1) The Toshiba HD-DVD player only outputs 1080i. Every 1080p display can "deinterlace" that to 1080p, but most displays will not do a really good job with it. The VP50 should be able to give you a perfect 1080p signal for HD-DVD.

(2) The Samsung HD-DVD player outputs either 1080i or 1080p60. For 1080i see (1). When using 1080p60, you have the typical NTSC 3:2 motion judder. If your display is capabable to accept and natively display 1080p with 24Hz or 48Hz or 72Hz, then the VP50 can give you judder free playback.

(3) Movie broadcasting is done in 1080i. See (1).

(4) Sports broadcasting is done in 1080i. This is even more extreme than (1), because sports is recorded interlaced. Deinterlacing this in a good way is really difficult and the VP50 is almost guaranteed to do it better than any display out on the market.

(5) Of course SD is handled much better by the VP50 than by (almost?) any display.

(6) The VP50 can do gamma calibration etc, if you want to ISF calibrate your setup.

There are more benefits, but these are probably the most important. Whether this is worth 3k USD for you, is your personal decision, of course. It might depend on how good of a video processor your display has built in. The better the video processing in your display is, the less difference you'll see with the VP50.

One thing you should make sure is that your display supports 1:1 pixel mapping. That's important to get the best out of it. You can benefit from the VP50 without 1:1 pixel mapping, too, but you'd lose a bit of sharpness/detail this way.

Not "every" because mine doesn't.

Oh!

Westa,

I have run into you over in the Samsung 1080P LCD forum and know that you really like to "resolve every pixel of CSI: Miami". CSI: Miami is broadcast in 1080i video format which is very difficult to de-interlace into 1080P. Sports which are broadcast in 1080i(CBS, NBC, etc.) are also hard to de-interlace into 1080P. In fact, as far as I can tell reading these forums, only over the past few months have video processors been available on the market that will de-interlace 1080i into 1080p. The VP50, Crystalio II, Calibre Vantage and Algolith DragonFly are all examples.

I came over here because the SD on my 1080P LCD is woeful. I am looking at the same thing as you so the question you have to answer is that is it really worth the price to get the VP50 to properly de-interlace 1080i video into 1080P?

There are other benefits that madshi mentioned, but I think the most important is de-interlacing 1080i video into 1080P.

I personally don't think that the HD DVD and Blu Ray are as important because the content is stored as 1080p on the discs so when the players begin to output 1080p it will pass straight through to the panel.

Madshi,

At the risk of sounding ignorant, if the VP50 outputs 1080p/60 and the native rate of my Samsung LCD is 1080P/60 then why is 1:1 pixel mapping so important? I thought that 1:1 pixel mapping was important for sets with uncommon aspect ratios like 1365 x 768 etc as well as for HTPC use. Is that not the case or are you saying that 1:1 pixel mapping is important for something else that I am not think of like overscan?

I was hoping that I could just set the video processor to 1080p/60 and leave it alone. Is that too naive?

Yes, that's too naive. 1:1 pixel mapping and overscan belong together. If you have exactly 0% overscan, then you probably have 1:1 pixel mapping (or not). Basically 1:1 pixel mapping means that every pixel of the source is exactly shown by one physical pixel of your display. If you feed your display 1080p60, your display *can* automatically do 1:1 pixel mapping, but it can also zoom into the image = applying overscan. It depends on your display how it behaves. E.g. the new Pioneer 50" 1080p plasma "FHD1" has a special mode called "dot by dot" or something like that, which you can activate when feeding it 1080p. When you activate that, you have true 1:1 pixel mapping without having to tinker with the timings. If you deactivate "dot by dot", the FHD1 will overscan the image. Overscanning means rescaling, which is bad.