Picture Quality of my Pirates is not as good as Best Buy. Why? - Page 2

Well, yes and no. Increased framerate and reduced motion blur are a big part of making the picture look more 3D. As I recall, it's the main reason Trumbull increased his framerate to 60fps for the Showscan film format 20+ years ago. I think Ebert's been advocating 48fps film for several years as well.

I was in Best Buy last night to take a look at these sets after reading the threads here. The Samsung one was set up in a split-screen mode showing normal playback on the right and "motion enhanced" on the left. When you see this side-by-side on the same screen it's blatantly obvious that any tweaks to the demo or torch mode in the TV are completely superfluous compared to the motion enhancement trick. The motion enhancer makes a very dramatic and fundamental change to the appearance.

It's just as others have said -- on the left half of the screen (and only the left half) "The Office" looked like a soap opera, and PoTC looked like a behind-the-scenes documentary. The right half, which I assume was doing 5:5 pulldown, looked just like the rest of the TVs around it running the same demo reel. After watching it for several minutes it also became clear that 1) really slow motion doesn't exhibit much change; so slow pans of caves in "Planet Earth" looked the same on both halves; and 2) really fast or blurred motion confuses the hell out of the motion enhancer and the interpolated frames end up full of artifacts, such as blocky elements and pixelated after-images of moving objects. Watching objects right at the boundary, it also seemed that the halves the screen sometimes got just slightly out of sync.

It seems the motion enhancement is still in the early stages, and just like the scalers of years ago it has major problems handling certain types of content. Granted even if they get it working better it'll still cause movies to no longer look like film, so I don't know how much we can expect the tech to advance.

I see. I assumed that 120Hz is because it is the first LCM of 24, 30, 60 and divides nicely. I assumed it was going to do the cadence properly on 60i and that it would handle 24p correctly as well.

At the least it should handle 24P by repeating the frames. Interframe interpolation is very risky and is not worth the trouble. (IMHO).

Yeah, I wouldn't like it for movies. However, I'd like to try it with games that run at 30fps. If the developers can't get them all running at 60fps, maybe this can.

BTW, for those who want to see what this looks like, WinDVD has a feature called TrimensionDNM that I believe is the same thing.

That wouldn't actually help, as you'd just have some frames repeated - it wouldn't interpolate and fill in the gaps in your character's movement or whatever, nor would it be able to speed up the game's internal timer past whatever it had been able to render up to that time.

Okay, that makes sense - in order to interpolate frames, it has to know what the next frame is before rendering. So it shows frame A, then in order to show frame "AB" it has to see frame B first. Obviously that wouldn't work well for games because of the lag.

As I said earlier, unless you were watching an XBR4 or XBR5 it wasn't doing 5:5 pulldown, if it was a Samsung it wasn't doing it. It was just regular 24 being converted back to 60 and displayed. This is the problem with all of the new LCDs except the Sonys.

I recently took a look at one of Samsung's new sets demo-ing the 120Hz picture with Pirates. Honestly, it looked.....wrong. The picture was extremely sharp and the movement was ultra-smooth. But that smoothness almost made the film look like home video! Ugh.

I noticed that the footage of Pirates in the Sony Blu-ray demo at Best Buy appears to be of HD video origin, compared to the other film clips in the demo. Looks like they shot some scenes in HD video on the set of Pirates. I would agree that someone buying the Blu-ray disc based on the demo would find the discrepancy odd, if not downright deceiving. IMHO, HD sells itself in apples to apples comparisons - anything else is dishonest, erroneous, and counterproductive.

Unlikely. This is exactly the effect you get from these new TVs when the motion-enhancing effect is cranked up. As I mentioned above you can see it very clearly in the Samsung set when it's running in split-screen mode: one half of the screen looks like the usual movie, and the other half (with the motion effect applied) looks just like a behind-the-scenes documentary shot on HD video. In my case the same demo loop was running on all of the nearby TVs as well, so I know for certain that the effect comes entirely from the TV and not from any half-screen preprocessing of the demo footage.

Yep,
I've seen that footage too and it looks like behind the scene stuff filmed with an HD video camera. Looks like video instead of film.

I was recently in a Circuit City and saw a copy of Spider-Man 3 playing on a Sony Bravia. The picture looked fantastic, so crisp, so detailed, it blew me away it looked so good. But when I bought the movie and popped it into my ps3 and tried to watch it on my sharp 56" d64u, it didnt look nearly as good. I have my ps3 hooked directly into the tv via an hdmi cable. It looked good but it certainly didnt look as good as it did in the store. I sit about 7-10 feet away from the tv when I watch movies. Any idea what it wouldnt look as good at my house? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Probably was a 120Hz TV you saw in the store with the settings cranked for brightness/contrast...ie torch mode! The 120Hz is said to give a more 3D look but many find it very distracting. There is another thread on this relating to Pirates shown in the stores.

Keep in mind that stores like CC and BB crank their TV's up in both brightness and contrast. That can make movies and HDTV look really impressive.

I thought the 120 hz didnt make a difference? The stuff I red on CNET said it wasnt worth the extra cost.

I thought about that so I tried my best to recreate it at home, fiddling with the settings but no luck making it look nearly as good.

I've seen the 120hz demo at Best Buy and it's definitely eye opening. It definitely creates a razor sharp 3D effect. It almost felt like the Kraken from Pirates was coming out of the TV. Not sure I liked the effect though. Made it seem like you were at a Broadway play in the first row.

i find that only the high end sony bravia LCDs can match the "pop" of plasma HDTVs. what you're probably noticing is the extremely high contrast ratios inherent to these top tier sony lcd's.

this is the reason why i switched to plasma ... there's just something missing with non-bravia lcd's.

I found that after about 5 minutes of watching the Bravia that things looked very "fake" (for lack of a better word). The scene itself has a lot of 3 dimensionality but the people looked like cardboard cutouts scattered about, especially those close to the front. Sorry for the crappy explanation buts its all I got LOL.

are you sure it's supposed to add more detail to the picture? this doesn't really make sense to me. i always figured 120hz was there to eliminate "judder" by displaying each frame of a 24 frame per sec film exactly five times. as opposed to standard 60hz displays which alternate between showing each frame either 3 or 2 times.

Even if you don't like the 'digital video' effect on movies created by the 120Hz refresh thing its a neat thing to have and to turn on/off depending on the material. CG movies like "Open Season" and "Ice Age" look amazing and almost life-like on a 120Hz HDTV with 1080p/24, but film-based material (like "The Fugitive" or "Blood Diamond") comes across weird except for select exceptions like the underwater footage on "Planet Earth" (simply stunning!). Your mileage my vary but I kind-of wish I had the option to do the 120Hz thing with my set-up, which only goes up to 60Hz.

So its normal for my brand new 1080p tv to not look as good as the demo playing in the store....it just is what it is? And its only because the refresh rate is 60 instead of 120?

I saw a Samsung (LCD maybe?) in BB this past weekend playing PotC 3 and it looked amazingly 'clear'. Im guessing that was the 120hz feature doing that?

Well remember also, not all tvs are created equally. Now if you had bought the exact tv that was on display and it didn't look as good, I would think something is wrong. But to say "Why doesn't my Sharp look as good as that Bravia", well there could be a variety of reasons, first of which is....they are two different televisions

I haven't decided yet if I like these 120 hz refresh rate LCDs. At first glance they look amazing! But if you stand there and watch a scene for like 5 minutes, it does become a bit distracting and its like you're not watching a movie. Almost like you're watching a live action documentary or something. It's strange.

But I was under the impression that it was a really good tv. From what I read on cnet it had a really good picture with some uniformity issues. I figured the uniformity would only cause bright or dark areas, i didn't think it would create such a drastic change in picture quality. Especially since the idea of the tv was to have a quality set up for years into the future.

I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not saying its not a good tv, I'm sure it is. I guess what I'm saying is, when you're comparing two different TVs from two different manufacturers, there can be a lot of reasons for differences. And then you throw in that Best Buy is going to tweak the settings in the store to make it "eye-catching". So there's a lot at work here, that's all I'm saying.

Have you properly calibrated the settings for your Sharp TV? The default settings are often not that great when you get the set home.

I calibrated my Bravia using some of the numbers I found on this site, and I think that the Blu-ray movies I've watched look better than what I've seen demoed in the stores. My set is 52", 1080p, 60hz.

I guess the crux of my question is "Is there anything I can do short of buying the exact tv I saw in the store, to match its picture quality, on the set I currently own, or am I stuck with this tv as is?"

Was it the actual Spidey movie, or was it a demo loop? If the latter, it could be enhanced, higher bitrate or other manipulations.

I purchased "CRASH." The picture quality in some scenes was very ordinary, lower quality than any HD DVD I own, and barely above regular DVD. That said, some scenes looked really good. Although it is an mpeg2 encode, I think the major problem is the poor transfer itself because again, some scenes were very excellent looking. It seemed like the grainy LQ scenes were the ones with Jennifer Esposito, which were probably all shot together. Maybe in her case it's intentional, you know...coyote ugly.

I was in CC last weekend shopping for a BD player and they had POTC playing and it looked as if it was a live HD broadcast. It was crazy how real it looked. When I went home and popped my POTC in, it didn't look like that....but my TV was also only $1000 when I bought it new....not the 2800 they were charging for the Sony TV it was being shown on.