[jimbobuk]

I am currently a happy owner of a Panasonic 300E... it mostly impresses me and is a pleasure to use.. I live in the UK and sadly aside from the odd WMV demo and the T2 disc we have no HDTV over here.. as such the 300E is ideally suited to our tv system and as the manual says its in one of its best modes displaying PAL..


anyways the afore mentioned HDTV material that i for one hope continues to increase and improve is already showing me that its the future and damn good at that.. I can only get 1600x1200 out of my 19" monitor but its really nice seeing the videos at that res... the drop in resolution then to my 960x540 projector is fairly pronounced.. its still a BIG improvement watching this HD material over normal dvds.. especially on the rendered ones like the new MS HD one which just looks damn nice, as did their pinball video before though of course they are a bit soulless... I'd love to see a pixar movie at that res, that must be mind blowing...


Ok so will the next generation of projectors be capable of displaying this!?!? i would consider upgrading to the 500 panny but from what i've heard its not that big a jump up and i've heard no news of 1:1 at 50hz as was the norm with the 300E... the main thing being though that the resolution improvements aren't enough to really do HD justice or improve visible pixels THAT much.. i imagine its a nice improvement but i just see 1080p as being almost perfect on a 100" screen, with pixels being barely dicernable... i've never seen one mind.. nor a normal HDTV set... are there any 1080p projectors available atm!? I bet they cost a fortune...


Finally.. anyone in the UK found coral reef in the uk yet.. play.com had it but they're out of stock and have been for weeks

 

[Thue]

Seems like the coverage from CES gave an impression, that true HD soon will be standard.

 

[TimB]

At least as far as DLP is concerned, it seemed the feedback was that TI's new xHD (1080p) chip was destined for RPTVs first, and might find its way into front projectors in a year or two.

 

[Mac The Knife]

"...the main thing being though that the resolution improvements aren't enough to really do HD justice or improve visible pixels THAT much."


IMO, the real benefit to a true 1920x1080 projector will be the absense of any scaling artifacts, not the increase in resolution. For example, my only complaint about my HS20 is that there are scaling artifacts that soften the picture during motion.

 

[jimbobuk]

why will scaling artefacts be reduced!? from the higher resolution meaning smaller pixels, smaller jaggies that aren't visible?! it just seems a bit of a contradiction..


To me that resolution will be nice but even with all these delays it'll certainly arrive globally and probably in the UK before any HD source is available on it beyond what is filtering out now.. perhaps blue ray will launch as well.. we shall wait and see i guess.. for now a 300E is almost ideal for PAL tv/dvd/games ... I do wish i could get a bit further away from the screen sometimes but its a minor niggle... and ffdshow sharpening helps a bit


Cheers

 

[Stereodude]

Quote:

Originally posted by jimbobuk why will scaling artefacts be reduced!?

Because you won't be scaling HD any more.

 

[Mac The Knife]

Quote:

Originally posted by jimbobuk why will scaling artefacts be reduced!? from the higher resolution meaning smaller pixels, smaller jaggies that aren't visible?! it just seems a bit of a contradiction.. ... Cheers

The higher resoution will be fine for static images, the problems really start when you have to scale motion. Most scalers just are not smart enough or fast enough to scale rapidly changing images without introducing a bunch of artifacts. These artifacts are often 3 or 4 pixel wide blurs, so the higher resolution is not totally able to hide them. Now, if there were 3840x2160 displays avaliable, that would be a different matter.

 

[jimbobuk]

does the use of an HTPC remove this problem or at least reduce it!?


I run at 1:1 on my 300E.. I've also recently started using ffdshow's lanczos scale to near native resolution, it DOES look better..


Also i guess for the lack of HDTV material for me most of my watching will be upscaled anyways eventually..


Ok, thanks..

 

[scotty144]

Jim, I to have recently started using ffd show with my 300 and I also noticed an improvement in pq...Would you be willing to share your settings with me?

 

[cpc]

I'm not too familiar with resolutions, but with DVD's at 480, wouldn't be good to have a display that does 960p? Say 1706 x 960? That way the scaling is a simple doubling (quadrupling or whatever, considering the de-interlaing too).

 

[bk]

Having native 1080 chips won't eliminate scaling unless the source is sending 1080(p/i). The currently HDTV is broadcast as either 480p(Fox), 720p or 1080i. Of course 1080i will still require de-interlacing.


Since 1080p requires substantially more bandwidth/storage than lesser resolutions it may be a real long time before 1080p source is available.

 

[jschefdog]

Quote:

Originally posted by bk Since 1080p requires substantially more bandwidth/storage than lesser resolutions it may be a real long time before 1080p source is available.

1080p source may be closer than you think. Checkout the discussion of Coral Reef Adventure in the Home Theater Computers forum. They are already distributing 1080P source in the form of Windows Media Video on standard DVD, although it is not quite 1920 pixels wide, I think it is 1440 but still displays at 16x9. The horizontal pixels were limited so it could play on current PC hardware, not because of WMV or DVD space limitations. In fact, they got both a 720P and 1080P version on a single DVD. More titles are coming but the announced titles are mostly more IMAX stuff so far. Hopefully we will see more Hollywood movies in the coming year.

 

[jimbobuk]

Quote:

Jim, I to have recently started using ffd show with my 300 and I also noticed an improvement in pq...Would you be willing to share your settings with me?

Sure though I'm no expert... this seems to be the best i can do at the moment (2100 XP chip reduces your options a bit)


Resize: 960x720 (tried native 960x540 but thats downscaling PAL dvds)

with Sharpen: Lanczos, luma, chroma sharpen both set to 2.00

Gradual deniose: 12 (10-20)


I am not totally sure but i had another version of ffdshow before a recent install and i'm sure the sharpening was more obvious.. I tried the recommended version and it DID use less CPU but i also found it wasn't sharpening a lot..


If you read official recommendations you'll find lower sharpen values and i really do think this varies from source to source but for me maxed out sharpen is the way forward.. it helps reduce that ohh i'm too close to the screen it all looks a tiny bit too blury... as i said i'm sure it used to sharpen more before... for one i used to not be able to go any higher than 960x540 res.. so something's changed..


Its nice to test it whilst watching.. and it works differently on each scene.. distance shots of buildings can make it look very obvious.. other stuff like off focus face shots and you wont be able to tell.. With this amount of sharpening you sometimes do get halos but they are very subtle (the resize must help a little (even more so if you could resize to larger but then you'd need another scale back to native)) and i can live with them for the extra stuff you kind of see..


I also find it VERY hard to spot chroma sharpening, i've yet to spot it in realtime sliding between 0 and 2 on any scene so i leave it on full.. its all on the luma sharpening...


Another thing that i've found is though your CPU is maxed out with software rendering and ffdshow i DO find that i can now use reclock where as the same hardware used to hiccup.. perhaps reclock has improved but combined with reclock i have a near perfect dvd playback experience


Still not making up for lack of HDTV but i really do think at this resolution that you are almost like getting half the benefit of HD on some material...

 

[jimbobuk]

I definately know HD is coming with Windows media at least for now.. and indeed i am enjoying it.. as asked in original post on this thread i'm still trying to find a uk stock of coral reef.. its still out of stock.. i've got all the demos off their site.. really nice stuff.. and i already have T2 extreme.. which is nice but less of an improvement as i dont think its really using the resolution.. not by the time its downsampled back to my projector res anyways

 

[HorrorScope]

I'll live with 720P material if they can even give us that in a timely manner. 720P is nothing to sneeze at my friends and is a large improvement to what we typically get today.

 

[Senator]

Ive heard of these HDV resolution WMV clips before but never seen one. Where can you d/load a sample from?


cheers


Sen

 

[Bertil]

Senator, try:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...m/HDVideo.aspx

 

[Bertil]

Oh, yeah. Back to topic. I want native 1080x1920 DLP soo bad. Is xHD the actual name of these upcoming chips?

 

[HorrorScope]

Bertil to educate me. What can we use 1080P for today? The only thing I can think of is with a 1080P I can bump the desktop resolution up, that would be nice but not a to die for, for me. Can you explain other uses that I'm missing? I'm sure I'm missing something. Thanks.


Heh, just thought of one, it should bring the 720P's price down some... Now that's good!

 

[melechmet]

Quote:

Originally posted by HorrorScope Bertil to educate me. What can we use 1080P for today? The only thing I can think of is with a 1080P I can bump the desktop resolution up, that would be nice but not a to die for, for me. Can you explain other uses that I'm missing? I'm sure I'm missing something. Thanks. Heh, just thought of one, it should bring the 720P's price down some... Now that's good!

Well, there's the MS WMV stuff (T2 and Coral Reef(sp?)) only 2 titles thus far but probably a lot more this year (at least a dozen); there are about 100 or so 1080P JVC D-Theater tapes, and another dozen announced recently. And let's not forget the obvious= HDTV! OTA for starters, and HD digital cable and HD Satellite are you have some HD (480P->1080i) programing. HDTV TIVO came out and content will proliferate quickly. Finally, for the gamers out there there are quite a few ready titles that can do 16:9 in 1080P, and a good deal to follow this year. Does that suffice above and beyond a desktop theme?