Don't have a Sony but have a Panasonic and am curious if there is any increase in PQ with a CRT. Let us know your impressions of this player. Thanks.
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First off, I hope you had a Merry Christmas. 
This statement seems to fly in the face of the usual: "Set everything to your display's native resolution."
You are the second source that I've seen this from in less than a week's time. The first? No less than Lumagen themselves, in their manual for their VisionPro HDP videprocessor.
They recommended going to 720p if your display accepts it, even for a Direct View.
If you do this, the TV is going to convert it to 1080i anyways, so aren't you creating an "extra step" and usually, those "extra steps" are undesireable?
| Originally Posted by justsc I see nothing distracting - any anomalies are few and far between. I think the real issues have to do with an interlaced display and fast motion - minor motion blur. The Oppo is much stronger with fixed-pixel displays, as are most of the upconverting players. The Oppo brings one of the nicest deinterlacers to the table, which is why it's usually best to view the 720p signal - that way you're getting the best the Oppo has to offer and the Sony has a great signal to process. |
This statement seems to fly in the face of the usual: "Set everything to your display's native resolution."
You are the second source that I've seen this from in less than a week's time. The first? No less than Lumagen themselves, in their manual for their VisionPro HDP videprocessor.
They recommended going to 720p if your display accepts it, even for a Direct View.
If you do this, the TV is going to convert it to 1080i anyways, so aren't you creating an "extra step" and usually, those "extra steps" are undesireable?
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Merry Christmas Q, and to all AVS Forum participants!
WOW! I feel so honored to be included alongside Lumagen.
Regarding 720p - the Lumagen and the Oppo are essentially video processors, right? The Oppo is a dvd player, but it's "bread and butter" feature is in its video processors. So, what are these folks really saying when recommending an output resolution of 720p, even for direct view sets? What Lumagen is saying in their manual holds true for the Oppo as well, and the Lumagen explanation is very well stated:
"High-definition direct-view and rear-projection televisions typically support 480p and
1080i. Some also support 540p or 720p. If 720p is supported, it is the recommended
resolution, because 1080i suffers from display interlace-artifacts that reduce the
perceived vertical resolution to roughly the same as 720p provides. Since the output is over-sampled horizontally, 720p provides nearly equivalent perceived vertical and
horizontal resolution as 1080i, and it eliminates interlaced-display artifacts."
The Oppo's processor has an outstanding de-interlacer. It is actually, admittedly, weak in the area of outputting interlaced signals. And yes, if you set either device to output 720p, our Sony sets automatically scale the signal to 1080i for display, which does constitute what we usually refer to as an "extra" and seemingly "undesireable" step. But in this case, this step is wholly welcome.
The greatest benefit derived from the Oppo (and I assume the Lumagen as well) is wrapped around the de-interlacing circuitry. The Oppo takes the standard definition 480i material and goes to work. The first step is in de-interlacing the material to progressive. Along with this is the detection of 24fps film-based material and converting it to 30fps video, including what's refered to as 3:2 reverse pull down. Then, another member of the chipset scales the material to either 720p or 1080i. Of course, all this is done in the digital domain. If the output is set to 1080i, then none of the benefits of the deinterlacing circuitry gets applied. Alot more enhancement/cleanup is done here than just de-interlacing.
As I understand it, the best approach to get the very cleanest signal from the Oppo player is to allow the player to apply both it's de-interlacing and scaling circuitry to the signal and send that "cleanest" 720p signal to the Sony 1080i set. Then the tv can deliver the best possible PQ as it simply scales the signal to 1080i for display. I'm sure this is Lumagen's thinking as well when they recommend the 720p output to a 1080i display. It's the old "garbage in - garbage out" in reverse - "best in - best out."
I sure hope this makes sense - it's my best shot at explaining why, in these cases, that "extra step" is actually essential. By the way, there are some owners of 1080i sets that have no problems with 1080i out from the Oppo, but from everything I've read, for 1080i sets, setting the Oppo to 720p out gets you the best PQ.
Cheers!
| Originally Posted by Q of BanditZ First off, I hope you had a Merry Christmas. This statement seems to fly in the face of the usual: "Set everything to your display's native resolution." You are the second source that I've seen this from in less than a week's time. The first? No less than Lumagen themselves, in their manual for their VisionPro HDP videprocessor. They recommended going to 720p if your display accepts it, even for a Direct View. If you do this, the TV is going to convert it to 1080i anyways, so aren't you creating an "extra step" and usually, those "extra steps" are undesireable? |
WOW! I feel so honored to be included alongside Lumagen.
Regarding 720p - the Lumagen and the Oppo are essentially video processors, right? The Oppo is a dvd player, but it's "bread and butter" feature is in its video processors. So, what are these folks really saying when recommending an output resolution of 720p, even for direct view sets? What Lumagen is saying in their manual holds true for the Oppo as well, and the Lumagen explanation is very well stated:
"High-definition direct-view and rear-projection televisions typically support 480p and
1080i. Some also support 540p or 720p. If 720p is supported, it is the recommended
resolution, because 1080i suffers from display interlace-artifacts that reduce the
perceived vertical resolution to roughly the same as 720p provides. Since the output is over-sampled horizontally, 720p provides nearly equivalent perceived vertical and
horizontal resolution as 1080i, and it eliminates interlaced-display artifacts."
The Oppo's processor has an outstanding de-interlacer. It is actually, admittedly, weak in the area of outputting interlaced signals. And yes, if you set either device to output 720p, our Sony sets automatically scale the signal to 1080i for display, which does constitute what we usually refer to as an "extra" and seemingly "undesireable" step. But in this case, this step is wholly welcome.
The greatest benefit derived from the Oppo (and I assume the Lumagen as well) is wrapped around the de-interlacing circuitry. The Oppo takes the standard definition 480i material and goes to work. The first step is in de-interlacing the material to progressive. Along with this is the detection of 24fps film-based material and converting it to 30fps video, including what's refered to as 3:2 reverse pull down. Then, another member of the chipset scales the material to either 720p or 1080i. Of course, all this is done in the digital domain. If the output is set to 1080i, then none of the benefits of the deinterlacing circuitry gets applied. Alot more enhancement/cleanup is done here than just de-interlacing.
As I understand it, the best approach to get the very cleanest signal from the Oppo player is to allow the player to apply both it's de-interlacing and scaling circuitry to the signal and send that "cleanest" 720p signal to the Sony 1080i set. Then the tv can deliver the best possible PQ as it simply scales the signal to 1080i for display. I'm sure this is Lumagen's thinking as well when they recommend the 720p output to a 1080i display. It's the old "garbage in - garbage out" in reverse - "best in - best out."
I sure hope this makes sense - it's my best shot at explaining why, in these cases, that "extra step" is actually essential. By the way, there are some owners of 1080i sets that have no problems with 1080i out from the Oppo, but from everything I've read, for 1080i sets, setting the Oppo to 720p out gets you the best PQ.
Cheers!
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Be sure to hook it up with the DVI to HDMI cable and select Video 2 in the user settings.
Enjoy!
| Originally Posted by AriasCA I ordered one of these last night for my Sony 34" XBR960. Can't wait to test it out to see if it lives up to the hype... |
Enjoy!
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Yes. I've tried 480p and it is very "jumpy" and there's some very annoying scintillation.
I know it seems to make sense to send 1080i to a 1080i set. And maybe I'm failing to communicate what I understand to be the benefits of allowing the Oppo to add its value via the Faroudja de-interlacer. From what I understand, the value of the video processors in the Oppo go well beyond just de-interlacing and scaling the dvds 480i material. If one selects the output to be 1080i, then much of this benefit is bypassed as the lionshare of the processing would now be limited to just scaling the film-based material to 1080i video.
Bottom Line (for my set) is that the PQ is rock solid, smooth, film-like and clear as a bell when outputting 720p. When outputting 1080i there's intolerable flicker and what I describe as a "pulsing" from left to right on the screen. And there are very clear motion artifacts. Take for instance the movie "Robots" in 1080i. In the opening scenes when the camera is panning the storefronts, you can easily make out excessive motion blur and flicker - looks bad. In 720p the same sequence is smooth, steady & crisp/clear.
Oppo offers an extensive article that tries to highlight some of the advantages of its unit plus some of the technical issues involved in film transfer to video:
http://www.oppodigital.com/Getting-M...V-Display.html
This is a nice short article on why Oppo believes its methods are superior to other upconverting players in the same class:
http://www.oppodigital.com/OPPO-DVI-...ying-Guide.htm
For me, I didn't buy the Oppo for its upconversion capability. I became convinced that the Oppo's video processors were substantially better than what's inside the Sony tv. And I found this to be true using the HQV DVD that puts Video Processors through some very rigerous tests. When sending 480i from a player to the tv, you get a chance to see how well the tv handles the video processing. When allowing the dvd player to do the processing you get a chance to see how well its processors perform. The tv failed the majority of the tests on the disc, while the Oppo player passed most tests with flying colors (pun intended).
In the Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity DVD Player benchmark, the only dvd player to score better than the Oppo for picture quality was the $3K Denon 5910.
This is from a July '05 review of the Oppo by Projector Central:
"So what makes the Oppo OPDV971H DVD player so hot? While its form factor is sleek with a low profile and uncluttered look, its digital performance is without equal at apparently any price based on the 2005 DVD Player Benchmark shootout by Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity that ended last month. The Oppo OPDV971H digital output (DVI) beat 39 other DVD players from 11 other companies including Panasonic, Pioneer, Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, LG, Onkyo, Teac, Oritron, Harmon Kardon, and McCormack. The price range of these products was $199 to $13,000. Guess who sells for $199 . . . Oppo."
The icing on the cake was how well the Oppo drove my home theater system - the player made it sound like I had a brand new high end set-up. I got audio quality from the Oppo that I've never heard on my system before.
I like the results and it was well worth my $199.
| Originally Posted by kny3twalker are you sure that it is not referring to displaying 720p, not just acceoting 720p as input since you could potentially get the "interlaced-display artifacts" when converting 720p to 1080i I too think you should convert to 1080i avoiding display scaling have you tried outputting 480p? since it is displayed natively |
I know it seems to make sense to send 1080i to a 1080i set. And maybe I'm failing to communicate what I understand to be the benefits of allowing the Oppo to add its value via the Faroudja de-interlacer. From what I understand, the value of the video processors in the Oppo go well beyond just de-interlacing and scaling the dvds 480i material. If one selects the output to be 1080i, then much of this benefit is bypassed as the lionshare of the processing would now be limited to just scaling the film-based material to 1080i video.
Bottom Line (for my set) is that the PQ is rock solid, smooth, film-like and clear as a bell when outputting 720p. When outputting 1080i there's intolerable flicker and what I describe as a "pulsing" from left to right on the screen. And there are very clear motion artifacts. Take for instance the movie "Robots" in 1080i. In the opening scenes when the camera is panning the storefronts, you can easily make out excessive motion blur and flicker - looks bad. In 720p the same sequence is smooth, steady & crisp/clear.
Oppo offers an extensive article that tries to highlight some of the advantages of its unit plus some of the technical issues involved in film transfer to video:
http://www.oppodigital.com/Getting-M...V-Display.html
This is a nice short article on why Oppo believes its methods are superior to other upconverting players in the same class:
http://www.oppodigital.com/OPPO-DVI-...ying-Guide.htm
For me, I didn't buy the Oppo for its upconversion capability. I became convinced that the Oppo's video processors were substantially better than what's inside the Sony tv. And I found this to be true using the HQV DVD that puts Video Processors through some very rigerous tests. When sending 480i from a player to the tv, you get a chance to see how well the tv handles the video processing. When allowing the dvd player to do the processing you get a chance to see how well its processors perform. The tv failed the majority of the tests on the disc, while the Oppo player passed most tests with flying colors (pun intended).
In the Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity DVD Player benchmark, the only dvd player to score better than the Oppo for picture quality was the $3K Denon 5910.
This is from a July '05 review of the Oppo by Projector Central:
"So what makes the Oppo OPDV971H DVD player so hot? While its form factor is sleek with a low profile and uncluttered look, its digital performance is without equal at apparently any price based on the 2005 DVD Player Benchmark shootout by Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity that ended last month. The Oppo OPDV971H digital output (DVI) beat 39 other DVD players from 11 other companies including Panasonic, Pioneer, Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, LG, Onkyo, Teac, Oritron, Harmon Kardon, and McCormack. The price range of these products was $199 to $13,000. Guess who sells for $199 . . . Oppo."
The icing on the cake was how well the Oppo drove my home theater system - the player made it sound like I had a brand new high end set-up. I got audio quality from the Oppo that I've never heard on my system before.
I like the results and it was well worth my $199.
Quote:
Thou hast intruiged me enough where I must experiment more closely, with HQV and Avia discs side by side, 720p vs. 1080i on my XBR960 and see what's what.
I get the logic behind what you're saying (and apparently Lumagen as well...)
I guess the final word on it is: YMMV.
| Originally Posted by justsc Yes. I've tried 480p and it is very "jumpy" and there's some very annoying scintillation. I know it seems to make sense to send 1080i to a 1080i set. And maybe I'm failing to communicate what I understand to be the benefits of allowing the Oppo to add its value via the Faroudja de-interlacer. From what I understand, the value of the video processors in the Oppo go well beyond just de-interlacing and scaling the dvds 480i material. If one selects the output to be 1080i, then much of this benefit is bypassed as the lionshare of the processing would now be limited to just scaling the film-based material to 1080i video. Bottom Line (for my set) is that the PQ is rock solid, smooth, film-like and clear as a bell when outputting 720p. When outputting 1080i there's intolerable flicker and what I describe as a "pulsing" from left to right on the screen. And there are very clear motion artifacts. Take for instance the movie "Robots" in 1080i. In the opening scenes when the camera is panning the storefronts, you can easily make out excessive motion blur and flicker - looks bad. In 720p the same sequence is smooth, steady & crisp/clear. Oppo offers an extensive article that tries to highlight some of the advantages of its unit plus some of the technical issues involved in film transfer to video: http://www.oppodigital.com/Getting-M...V-Display.html This is a nice short article on why Oppo believes its methods are superior to other upconverting players in the same class: http://www.oppodigital.com/OPPO-DVI-...ying-Guide.htm For me, I didn't buy the Oppo for its upconversion capability. I became convinced that the Oppo's video processors were substantially better than what's inside the Sony tv. And I found this to be true using the HQV DVD that puts Video Processors through some very rigerous tests. When sending 480i from a player to the tv, you get a chance to see how well the tv handles the video processing. When allowing the dvd player to do the processing you get a chance to see how well its processors perform. The tv failed the majority of the tests on the disc, while the Oppo player passed most tests with flying colors (pun intended). In the Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity DVD Player benchmark, the only dvd player to score better than the Oppo for picture quality was the $3K Denon 5910. This is from a July '05 review of the Oppo by Projector Central: "So what makes the Oppo OPDV971H DVD player so hot? While its form factor is sleek with a low profile and uncluttered look, its digital performance is without equal at apparently any price based on the 2005 DVD Player Benchmark shootout by Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity that ended last month. The Oppo OPDV971H digital output (DVI) beat 39 other DVD players from 11 other companies including Panasonic, Pioneer, Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, LG, Onkyo, Teac, Oritron, Harmon Kardon, and McCormack. The price range of these products was $199 to $13,000. Guess who sells for $199 . . . Oppo." The icing on the cake was how well the Oppo drove my home theater system - the player made it sound like I had a brand new high end set-up. I got audio quality from the Oppo that I've never heard on my system before. I like the results and it was well worth my $199. |
I get the logic behind what you're saying (and apparently Lumagen as well...)
I guess the final word on it is: YMMV.
Quote:
Q,
YMMV - exactly.
Be careful to measure the "right" stuff. This isn't simply 720p vs. 1080i. The source is just as important as the material and the format. Everything I've been writing about is specifically related to Oppo's video processors and it's 720p output signal versus:
1) my 34HS420's processing of a 480i dvd
2) any of my previous dvd players
3)Oppo's own 1080i
Have fun with your research!
| Originally Posted by Q of BanditZ Thou hast intruiged me enough where I must experiment more closely, with HQV and Avia discs side by side, 720p vs. 1080i on my XBR960 and see what's what. I get the logic behind what you're saying (and apparently Lumagen as well...) I guess the final word on it is: YMMV. |
YMMV - exactly.
Be careful to measure the "right" stuff. This isn't simply 720p vs. 1080i. The source is just as important as the material and the format. Everything I've been writing about is specifically related to Oppo's video processors and it's 720p output signal versus:
1) my 34HS420's processing of a 480i dvd
2) any of my previous dvd players
3)Oppo's own 1080i
Have fun with your research!
Quote:
"Just when you think you have all the answers, I go and change all the questions."
Bonus points to whomever figures out who I stole that quote off of.
| Originally Posted by justsc Q, YMMV - exactly. Be careful to measure the "right" stuff. This isn't simply 720p vs. 1080i. The source is just as important as the material and the format. Everything I've been writing about is specifically related to Oppo's video processors and it's 720p output signal versus: 1) my 34HS420's processing of a 480i dvd 2) any of my previous dvd players 3)Oppo's own 1080i Have fun with your research! |
"Just when you think you have all the answers, I go and change all the questions."
Bonus points to whomever figures out who I stole that quote off of.
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