Posted by Joshua Zyber on 06/18/06 14:36

"Alpha" <none@none.net> wrote in message
news:1296vbcrnd2a55b@corp.supernews.com...
> Show one review that states they are a piece of crap (or anything like
> that).

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=7849002#post7850079

Alright� after spending several days with the Samsung player and several
different Blu-ray discs, I feel I�ve got an excellent grasp on what you
can expect from this player and the format in general for the next few
months. Old readers of DVDFile might remember that I used to be one of
the site�s main reviewers for DVD content, so I do have a bit of a
background here. I�m going to focus on what I viewed to be the best
looking of the BD titles I viewed in addition to a title that hasn�t
been covered elsewhere: XXX. This is a title that provides for a longer
running time than most of the early BD titles (123 minutes) and also
contains lots of movement to test MPEG2�s abilities.

The short of it is that I completely agree with Andrew P and, by
extension, BigMikeATL. Blu-ray, as it exists today in both hardware and
software, is a good, but not great format. I�m starting to see a bit of
a pattern with these early BD titles as they generally are shorter films
with bright, colorful cinematography. Those are the conditions under
which MPEG2 BD looks its best. While I was initially questioning what
the early adopter appeal of films like Hitch or 50 First Dates could be,
now I can understand it.

Let�s start with SD ability as it compares to the Toshiba. Again, I put
the player in the very good but not great slot. I think the Toshiba
still presents a slightly sharper picture overall when compared to the
Samsung. But the Samsung is very much improved over their older models.
So if you owned an 841, 850, 941, or 950, you should be happy with the
improvement that the BD-P1000 provides. However, those previous models
provided an option to pillarbox 4:3 material and zoom 4:3 letterbox
images, neither of which is possible on the 1000. So the Toshiba gets a
point on that, but the Toshiba also lacks the ability to zoom 4:3
letterbox material, so shame on them both. But overall, advantage
Toshiba on SD DVD presentation.

For BD ability, I�m now going back to my XXX disc and BD in general. Had
this format and these titles launched in early April, I would have been
happy. Unfortunately for Blu-ray, HD-DVD launched in mid-April and did
two things to impair BD: They�ve gotten more titles out to consumers and
they�ve provided an HD experience that is better than BD. Now the
difference isn�t huge, but it should be noticeable, even to people who
might not normally see these kinds of things. Sorry to have to say it,
but BD is an unimpressive format in the shadow of HD-DVD. Had they
happened in reverse, HD-DVD would have had to work hard to impress upon
people that buying their player (even at half the price of BD) was worth
the effort for the slight improvement they offered. Now, BD is in a
position to justify a premium for a product that is slightly inferior to
what is already available. When I first cracked open the HD-A1 in April
and popped in that Last Samurai HD-DVD, I was wowed with what I thought
to be the best HD image my television had ever produced. The HD image
was smooth and rich with a sharpness and depth I�d never experienced.
Most of the HD-DVD titles released thus far (with a few now famous
exceptions) have this �pop� that takes them out of the realm of what I
would consider normal HD. The Blu-ray discs I�ve sampled thus far, while
they�ve looked good to even great, have all lacked that �pop� and
instead generally look a lot closer to good OTA HD broadcasts. If you
were to show me the XXX BD and tell me it was a Showtime broadcast, I
wouldn�t hesitate to think you were telling me the truth. But I would
never believe that about most of the HD-DVD titles out there right now.

The sad truth is that MPEG2 just isn�t cutting it against VC-1. Now
while it�s difficult to impossible to be able to judge the quality of
one film in one codec against a different film in a different codec, I
can stack the deck to try and approximate a decent comparison. I
compared XXX BD to Unforgiven HD-DVD. Unforgiven is 10 years older than
XXX, so this should have been a slam dunk for image quality in favor of
XXX. Guess what, the VC-1 Unforgiven consistently outperformed the MPEG2
of XXX. Just look at chapter 4 of Unforgiven. All of the characters are
sharply in focus, while the intricate detail in the background wallpaper
is consistently resolved. XXX, by contrast appears somewhat soft and
lacking in dimensionality. In all of the BD titles I viewed there�s a
consistent soft, yet noisy quality to the images that appears as a
mixture of natural film grain and digital noise. Fine details, such as
rocks on the ground or wall textures, are often seen flickering
slightly, which is often annoying.

I�m also curious about how many of these initial discs are truly 1080p.
I saw more stairstepping and artifacting throughout one viewing of XXX
than I have in 2+ months of HD-DVD viewings. Here�s a few moments for
reference� at :38 the tail of the Revolutions logo there is some pretty
good banding visible. Right after that, serious jaggies on the XXX logo
that starts the film. At 32:08, look at the grill of the car for more
jaggies while 10 seconds later, at 32:18, you�ll also get some pretty
good stairstepping at the base of the balcony. Unfortunately (or
fortunately, depending on how you view it), these artifacts don�t appear
on the SD Superbit version of the film when viewed on the Toshiba A1.
More surprising, they also don�t appear when the Superbit DVD is viewed
on the Samsung BD-P1000. The banding was visible on the Superbit, but it
was much less severe than the Blu-ray banding.

Essentially, from what I�ve seen so far, visually Blu-ray is, at its
best, all of the worst qualities of HD-DVD right now. If you�re someone
who was bothered by the HD-DVDs of The Fugitive, Full Metal Jacket, and
Perfect Storm, you�re not going to find a ton to like in some of these
early offerings. Again, they can look really, really good, but they don�t
consistently look great. How much of this is a byproduct of the Samsung
player is unknown until other players make it to market but a few things
are pretty clear�

Sony, as a company, has a lot riding on the success of Blu-ray. With as
much at stake as they have, these titles needed to raise the bar over
what we�ve already seen. But because as a company they seem to be more
focused on their royalties and the ability to cross promote, they have
succeeded in being the second to market with the second best product.
Here�s an example of what I mean� The XXX disc has a selection in its
menus for �Previews.� These are the SD MPEG2 trailers for Stealth, Into
the Blue, and SWAT. So there�s approx. 200-250MB taken up by Sony trying
to get you to buy other Sony products. With that space, Sony could have
instead done a few other things. Why not include the XXX trailer and the
Rob Cohen commentary? Why not use that 200MB to try and eliminate that
banding at the beginning of the movie? Instead, Sony appears to have
needed that space to get you to spend more money rather than providing
us with the best product to entice us to spend more money. Compare that
with the Warner and Universal titles, which are not only visually more
impressive, but also packed to the rims with bonus content. Universal
certainly didn�t need to include all the stuff from the more expensive 2
DVD Cinderella Man, but they did and provided an excellent value on that
disc.

Sony has two things that have to happen and happen fast in order for
Blu-ray to really make this a good race: They need to implement the
advanced video and audio codecs and they need to get 50GB discs working.
They have to do both of these and they have to do them fast. With only
50GB and still working MPEG2, they�re probably going to be able to equal
or hover slightly below HD-DVD as it exists now. With newer codecs but
only 25GB discs, they�ll be able to match HD-DVD visually, but will have
a 5GB disadvantage. Only with both of these in existence will this
format even have a chance. And they need to do this much sooner rather
than later. Unfortunately, by the time the Sony player launches in
mid-August, there are going to be maybe 30 titles available, while
HD-DVD, by that point in August, will be sporting double that and could
be up to as high as 75 different titles.

A few of the quirks about the Samsung BD-P1000 that I haven�t seen
mentioned yet are the resolution and audio settings. On the video side,
I�ve had a few instances where the resolution would change on the player
without me having to select it. It switched from the 1080i that I had
set it to to a very much inferior 720p setting that softened the picture
even more that I found it at 1080. I�ll be curious to see additional
comments as the player becomes more widely available and whether the
player switching itself from 1080 to 720 happens with others. On the
audio side, I�m running the player HDMI to a new Denon 3806 HDMI in.
Unfortunately, there seems to be something bungled with how the player
handles the bitstream vs. PCM tracks. To play the Dolby 5.1 track, the
player has to have the digital out in the player�s menu set to
�bitstream.� However, if you select one of the Sony uncompressed 5.1
tracks from the menu, it will only play back in 2-channel PCM. Selecting
PCM from the player menu will output 5.1 PCM via HDMI, but then converts
the Dolby tracks to 2-channel PCM. So you could potentially have to
change player settings depending on the disc and soundtrack you want to
hear. Can anyone else using their player via HDMI confirm this behavior?

Ultimately, the potential is there for Blu-ray to succeed, but it is
unclear when that potential might be approached. For all of the
complaints about HD-DVD not being ready for primetime, I think that
despite all of its faults, the bottom line is that HD-DVD delivered the
big jump up in picture quality and interactivity that many of us were
anticipating and has set the bar in terms of HD. Blu-ray, unfortunately,
has failed to go �Beyond High Definition.�

Cliff

Equipment list:
Toshiba 50� 50H13 DVI in from
Denon 3806 HDMI out and in from
Samsung BD-P1000 HDMI out and
Toshiba HD-A1 HDMI out

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