Blu-ray, HD-DVD & SD DVD Comparison Screenshots *WARNING - LARGE PICTURE FILES* - Page 25

Has SD always sucked so bad or is just because we have something better to compare it to now? I say it always sucked and we tried to convince ourselves it was okay.

SD was fine when you watch it on 32 inch widescreen CRT displays.

When you watch it on 100 inch HD displays it wasnt good enough.

Another excellent contribution by our evergreen XYLON. What was the D.U test verdict on Blood Diamond ?

Xylon, why the Blu-Ray screen in this post:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...5#post11585845

Has the following file name: Bloodhddvd6.1.png.png

hddvd? Is this correct for a bd screen?

I don't know about that. SD is just fugly up close. You really can't sit less than 3-4 screen widths away without the softness driving you insane. I will admit that some SD material looks "okay" from across the room but that's a crummy way to watch a movie.

I think the digital upsample process used to size normalize these sd and hd screenshots is inherently a destructive process to pq. Granted, it's a mandatory step in order to make these screenshot comparisons, but if you could reason to leave the sd shots at the native size, they would look just fine (albeit, smaller). The same thing would happen if you upscaled the hd shots (or a portion of it) 2.25x the native size. It would not look that good, either.

That is true. SD when viewed in it's native resolution (or close to it) on on a small monitor/desktop window is okay. In fact, it's quite watchable and blows away YouTube.

Yep, 2-D animation does not benefit much from HD.

The japanese HD broadcast looks better than the blu-ray. We need this on HD DVD.

So, edge enhancement = looks better?

Blood Diamond is as bad as the reviewers said. strange for such a new release.

OH MY GOD, Warner suck in DVD both those movie are terrible compression artifact on DVD.

Bandai missed with the GITS master, the black are crushed to dead just like the dvd master.... But the Broadcast version is ulgy too, filled with Mega EE everywhere. That would have been annoying to death, glad bandai didn't EE any of their transfert.. yet..

If it was under $40 I'd buy, but not at that insane price. No way.

well that depends on the tv, widescreen crts come in a full range of different quality, and the one he had was really that good. Actually in many ways i prefered that image with dvd, then most 32inch lcd with hd.

It was crisp with great colors and no smear.

I will pay top dollar for Evangelion in HD DVD...

I think he was talking about the DVD release. I have both, and the DVD is just awful.

Any chance of getting a Robocop comparison? Much obliged.

I saw the Blood Diamond Blu-Ray on my brother´s 720p projector and it didn´t impress me there either. I would never have called it "bad" though. I think it´s "just good". The movie itself is not that great any way if I may say so.

TMNT looks nice. The wide shot with the lightning looks a bit blurry but it´s an action-shot. I wish they would release it in Germany!

I appreciate viewing these screen shots, but at the same time I have to agree with
what some people have been saying regarding the SD shots: they just don't really seem
to fully represent how lots of SD DVDs really look. The SD shots in this thread are significantly softer than what I see in many SD DVDs. For instance, on my plasma SD DVDs are MUCH sharper and more crisply detailed. They look almost HD from my normal viewing distance. Even if I look at these screen shots from a distance that mimics the same field of view I get on my plasma, these SD screen shots still look significantly softer.

As well, I've been viewing quite a lot of SD DVD projected very large (between 105 to 120" wide) and I've been pleasantly amazed by how well some SD DVDs hold up even at that size. They still look pretty sharp and defined - certainly more so than the SD shots I'm seeing here.

So...I don't know what's happening, but something about the SD screenshots doesn't seem to represent how good SD often can look.

I agree. SD from my Oppo 980HD player scaled by a Lumagen Radiance look much better than shown here. SD also looks much better on my HTPC using a ATI 2600Pro and TheaterTek. So I suppose it has something to do with the player and graphics card. My display is a Panasonic 657UY.

Of course, HD DVD and Blu-Rays are a huge step up so I have been watching HDM pretty much exclusively.

- Rich

No, the contrast and shadow detail is better on the Japanese broadcast version. Take a look at the darker areas of the picture. Blacks are crushed badly on the Bluray version.

Also, the overall detail is better on the broadcast version, also, with very little edge enhancement artifacts, AFAICS.

Please folks, it's really not that hard to figure out

When you look at these screenshots on your computer screen, your viewing distance is probably smaller than the image width (!)
In my case I'm looking at the screenshots from a distance of about 0.8x image width because that's how close my screen is.

Now I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that none of you views movies from this close. Even in my front projection room, I'm sitting at roughly 1.5x image width.

So, long story short. You're likely gonna have to back up from your computer screen quite a bit, and you'll find out that the SD screenshots are starting to look better.
Alternatively, you can move closer than normal to your plasma and find out that SD really is every bit as bad as this thread depicts.