480, 720, 1080, I cant understand the fuss.

[traker1001]

I just purchased a new sony 50" 1080p tv and a blu-ray player, I watched a few 1080p movies on the tv, and frankly Im dissapointed. Sure the quality is better than tv, and a bit better than an upscaled 480p dvd, But IMHO its nowhere near worth the price or fuss that everyone I talk to has put into it.

One of my biggest pet peeves, is that I can still make out the compression noise on a full out blu-ray with a $6k tv, I think the real question is, when will the work out that darn compression noise and show us a true picture?

hope thats not to dumb of a question.

btw, the best upscaled dvd picture I have ever seen is that of dvds playing off my sage system, Outstanding, In some cases I thought the picture looked better the the blu-ray discs, especially when it comes to high speed motion.

[Polypro]

As a layman, I agree. Using my video card to upscale DVD to 1920x1080 with the PureVideo decoders looks great. As with everything, it's what looks "good enough" to me. HD-DVD and BR aren't worth the cost to me. I *might* try an XBox 360 HD-DVD for the HTPC when things shake out...but won't buy a stand alone.

P

[Mark SS]

Something must be wrong, with your setup or your eyes!

[Kirby]

I would guess the TV isnt setup right. I was in Best Buy yesterday and they were playing a Bluray disc of a show called Masters of Time (swiss watchmakers) on a 1080p set, and it looked horrible! I likened it to upconverted SD material! Of course the blue-shirted goon walked over and was commenting on the perfect picture and I just shook my head and walked away.

[roxy99]

Originally Posted by traker1001

I just purchased a new sony 50" 1080p tv and a blu-ray player, I watched a few 1080p movies on the tv, and frankly Im dissapointed. Sure the quality is better than tv, and a bit better than an upscaled 480p dvd, But IMHO its nowhere near worth the price or fuss that everyone I talk to has put into it.

One of my biggest pet peeves, is that I can still make out the compression noise on a full out blu-ray with a $6k tv, I think the real question is, when will the work out that darn compression noise and show us a true picture?

hope thats not to dumb of a question.

btw, the best upscaled dvd picture I have ever seen is that of dvds playing off my sage system, Outstanding, In some cases I thought the picture looked better the the blu-ray discs, especially when it comes to high speed motion.

Those of us who have paid all that money are also probably to embarassed to admit that, so we wait and see.

Of course there's going to be a big fuss! How else is the industry going to lure you into paying obscene sums of money? And anyway, how many DVDs are 1080p nowadays? Not a lot I bet. Oh well, that's the price you pay for being an early adopter.

[GbrNole]

$6k tv? you pay for it twice or something?

[erik]

Originally Posted by traker1001

btw, the best upscaled dvd picture I have ever seen is that of dvds playing off my sage system, Outstanding, In some cases I thought the picture looked better the the blu-ray discs, especially when it comes to high speed motion.

One thing to consider selection your playback option is motion compensation.
The more expensive TV's are able to do motion compensated upconversion on SD material.
There is no way any current TV or HD-DVD or BR player will be able to do motion compensated framerate upconversion on HD material.
Therefore from motion point of view a SD playback getting motion compensated framerate conversion and upscaling in the TV will look much better then a 1080P 30Hz BR disk going native to the 1080P panel of the same TV.

[stanger89]

This may go over like a lead balloon, but hey....

Originally Posted by traker1001

I just purchased a new sony 50" 1080p tv and a blu-ray player, I watched a few 1080p movies on the tv, and frankly Im dissapointed. Sure the quality is better than tv, and a bit better than an upscaled 480p dvd, But IMHO its nowhere near worth the price or fuss that everyone I talk to has put into it.

I completely agree. As some (many?) know, I've got a large, tweaked front projector (110" wide, 2.39:1, 1.5x seating distance) and have been watching upconverted DVD for about as long as I've been watching DVD.

I don't like stanalone players so I passed on the HD-A1, but when the 360 HD DVD player came out I picked one up (hey, $200 isn't too much for an experiment) and signed up for netflix (won't buy movies I can't copy to my server).

In principal I agree with you. I don't know what's with all these people making over the top comments, because while the difference is apparent, it's nothing like it's made out to be.

The difference is apparent, and all else equal I'd go the HD version of course, but I can still completely enjoy DVD. In fact DVD still surprises me somewhat how good it can look. And while HD-optical is better I guess my expectations are higher because the only time it surprised me, is it surprising me by how small the difference is.

One of my biggest pet peeves, is that I can still make out the compression noise on a full out blu-ray with a $6k tv, I think the real question is, when will the work out that darn compression noise and show us a true picture?

Two things, first, which BDs did you watch, because there are some very, very bad ones: Fifth Element, House of Flying Daggers come to mind. You should check out the later Warner ones, they're direct ports from their HD DVD releases. From what I've heard, MI3, Tears of the Sun, Chronicles of Riddic should be some of the best examples of HD out there.

Second, really bad BDs asside, in general, there are no compression artifacts on HD disks. IMO it's quite likely that you're seeing the film grain.

Basically (especially with HD DVD and more recent BDs), any artifacts you see are not from the encoding of the disc, they're from the master.

I don't know, maybe you should take that BD player back and get a Toshiba HD-A2 and give that a try

btw, the best upscaled dvd picture I have ever seen is that of dvds playing off my sage system, Outstanding,

Agreed, I watched Pirates of the Carribean last night (DVD, $1k for a BD player is rediculous, especially when they're getting shown up by HD DVD) and it looked great. I have not a complaint about it.

In some cases I thought the picture looked better the the blu-ray discs, especially when it comes to high speed motion.

Now that one I'm curious about, could you explain further?

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Mark SS

Something must be wrong, with your setup or your eyes!

FWIW, it's become a peve of mine to see such (appologies in advance) ignorant comments as this. Just because one does not agree that HD-optical is the next coming, does not mean they can't tell the difference.

Originally Posted by Kirby

I would guess the TV isnt setup right. I was in Best Buy yesterday and they were playing a Bluray disc of a show called Masters of Time (swiss watchmakers) on a 1080p set, and it looked horrible! I likened it to upconverted SD material! Of course the blue-shirted goon walked over and was commenting on the perfect picture and I just shook my head and walked away.

I'm not sure how much you guys have been following this, but Blu-ray does not have a stellar track record as far as quality goes. They've put out some inexplicably horrible releases, and some that match the best HD DVD has released.

Of course the quality of HD DVD releases varies too, but that's to be expected as the quality of the source material varies.

[roxy99]

Originally Posted by stanger89

FWIW, it's become a peve of mine to see such (appologies in advance) ignorant comments as this. Just because one does not agree that HD-optical is the next coming, does not mean they can't tell the difference.

I second that. Disagreement <> being blind

[jkohn]

I've heard most BD discs are still MPEG-2, while HD-DVD's were for the most part VC-1. I think as we get away from MPEG-2 and use VC-1 or H.264 the results will be much better, at least in the case of BR/HD DVD's. Unfortunately for OTA we're stuck with over-compressed MPEG-2 and the satellite companies are more interested in channel count than quality (I've heard that DirecTV's MPEG-4 HD channels are far worse than OTA MPEG-2 HD).

That said, even in the case of OTA MPEG-2 HD, the picture is still far better than upconverted DVD. Upconverting a DVD will prevent aliasing and pixelation but it can't create detail that isn't there. There is far more detail in a 1080i broadcast than a 480i DVD, and I would have to think anybody who says the look the same just isn't looking very closely.

[Fluffdaddy]

Originally Posted by GbrNole

$6k tv? you pay for it twice or something?

First thing that came to my mind also. A Sony 50" 1080p TV for $6K..............you got taken

[lobosrul]

The big difference is going from an old tube TV to HDTV (or even an widescreen EDTV). I can certainly tell the difference from a DVD to HDTV but its not huge. The difference from SDTV to a good anamorphic upscaled DVD is huge!

Another thing like jkohn said, is not all HD is equal. ATSC channels have a bandwidth of something like 17Mbps. Only the local CBS affiliate seems to use more than 13Mbps here. Think about this, a DVD frame has roughly 350,000 pixels, 1080i has a bit over 2 million. DVD's are encoded at about 5 to 6 Mbps. 1080i has 6 times more pixels a frame than DVD yet most channels are using less than triple the amount of bandwidth. This leads to compression artifacts, especially in high motion scenes. Sunday night football sometimes looks pretty terrible on NBC.

[autoboy]

I'm glad i'm not the only one here who can't tell much difference b/w HD-DVD and DVD. I can see the difference in still shots but on action shots it really does not make any difference. If the movie is any good I totally forget i'm watching HD-DVD. Then again, I only have a 55" 720p DLP. I'll wait for judgement until I get my 40" 1080p for my bedroom.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by jkohn

I've heard most BD discs are still MPEG-2,

Initial BDs were MPEG-2, but asside from Warner's first batch, all Warner's and Paramount's releases are VC-1, in the case of Warner (and probably Paramount) they're the exact same encodes used on HD DVDs. As for Sony I think they've begun moving to AVC.

while HD-DVD's were for the most part VC-1.

True

I think as we get away from MPEG-2 and use VC-1 or H.264 the results will be much better, at least in the case of BR/HD DVD's.

I like to rag on Sony for sticking stubbornly with MPEG-2, but realistically, the problems they had were only marginally impacted by the codec they used. I believe Tears of the Sun is MPEG-2 and by all accounts one of the best BDs so far.

Codec helps, and I'm all for VC-1, but the source material, the quality of the master, and the care taken in the encode are what really make the difference.

That said, even in the case of OTA MPEG-2 HD, the picture is still far better than upconverted DVD. Upconverting a DVD will prevent aliasing and pixelation but it can't create detail that isn't there. There is far more detail in a 1080i broadcast than a 480i DVD, and I would have to think anybody who says the look the same just isn't looking very closely.

The "debate" I suppose you could call it is not over the presence of the detail, it's over the, I suppose I would say "importance" of the extra detail in HD. To me, I guess I'd say the extra detail is the icing on the cake.

I mean compare VHS, or SDTV to anamorphic DVD. You can look at VHS or SDTV and tell it's bad, just by looking at it. DVD looks good, it looks darn good. HD looks better, of course.

But going back and forth between HD DVD and DVD, side by side, it's the fine detail that's more pronounced, edges are more refined. The biggest difference is on backgrounds. The biggest difference between HD and DVD is in the primary focus, it's in the backgrounds and such.

I posted some screenshot (taken with my Canon Digital SLR) in the Pictures thread:
http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthr...8&postcount=28

They illustrate my point. The picture of the cityscape, the HD is clearly better, much more detail in the cityscape.

But in the closeup of Riddick, there is much less difference.

[Polypro]

Just to be clear:

1. I haven't seen BR/HD-DVD

2. I do watch 1080i OTA and QAM everyday.

3. Switching from a 1080i broadcast to an upscaled Aeon Flux DVD makes me say that upscaled DVD's are "Good Enough" for me not to spend $500-1,000 on a stand-alone player.

4. I *will* probably experiment with the 360 HD-DVD when I research it more...$200 *is* worth it, "To Me".

5. My eyes are good, it's the ears that are shot...on board audio and Logitech speakers all the way baby!

P

[traker1001]

First let me point out I am a little hard of sight thus the reason for the big tv (Atleast thats what I tell my wife.), I think your right about it being film grain and not compression noise.

I agree the real question is all the detail really that important, I mean who cares if I can read the "Extras" news paper in the background

However on that note, I can tell a difference in details between the BR and upscaled DVD, but to me the difference is minute and not worth the extra cost, So I returned my BR player, I have the HD-DVD here sitting waiting for me to plug it in and try it out.

Fortunatly NetFlix has already started sending out hd movies or I might have been out some $$ for the movies to

BTW, As a side note, the TV was $2,300, My price in the original post was a screw up, All i looked at was the bottom of the receipt and not at the tv alone. I do thank you folks however for pointing out that had I spent that much I should return it.

As always sage is great.