View Full Version : Just saw my first Blu-Ray player.....
Shaun666
20-10-2006, 15:40
..and have to say I was underwhelmed.
To be fair I should say it was showing on a Panasonic 50" set which cannot display 1080p and I'm sot sure what disc it was playing.
It was showing a clip from Kingdom of Heaven that was split down the middle to show, allegedly, SD on one side and HD on the other side of the screen.
The SD side just looked as if it had been deliberately down-graded to make it look worse. It was in John Lewis in Oxford Street.
Hopefully once genuine discs are out and they can be viewed on 1080p screens things might improve.
thescrounger
20-10-2006, 15:57
I saw a BD demo today as well. I was also underwhelmed. Seen more impressive looking HD I must admit.
The Fantastic Four BR disc did not look very fantastic.
Drysolder
20-10-2006, 16:37
I saw a BD demo today as well. I was also underwhelmed. Seen more impressive looking HD I must admit.
The Fantastic Four BR disc did not look very fantastic.
Same here, saw one set up at our local John Lewis - playing Fantastic Four, it looked absolute gash when stacked up against the racks of screens showing the BBC HD preview.
Could it be a case of the wrong media as demo, as the bit I saw there were significant levels of what looked like film noise present.
Spectre07
20-10-2006, 19:35
I've seen HD DVD compared to DVD and was underwhelmed. Just goes to show the HD formats aren't really that much of a step up from fantastic DVD.
AndyWilson
20-10-2006, 19:39
I saw a BR demo in a Sony store in Las Vegas back in June - as everyone else has suggested I was distinctly underwhelmed.
kiran_mk2
20-10-2006, 20:45
The BBC HD demo I saw in Tesco the other day (on a range of screens) showed a large amount of banding and pixelisation around the letters.Impressive from a distance though.
I saw BR when on holiday in Canada recently - The Samsung player on a 1080p Samsung display. Looked OK but not that impressive compared to what I had expected having experienced my latest satellite broadcast HD in the States on our last trip.
However over a week later I saw my first HD DVD player [think it was a Toshiba] and it was truly far far superior in PQ. The footage here seemed to be of just some general shots of a seaside town - somewhere in the Med it looked like - whereas the BR footage was a demo disc with various movies trailers.
Have yet to see anything HD here apart from the aforementioned BBC HD preivew material a la Currys et al.
LouBarlow
20-10-2006, 22:53
The BBC HD demo I saw in Tesco the other day (on a range of screens) showed a large amount of banding and pixelisation around the letters.Impressive from a distance though.
Both HD-DVD and BR are a massive step-up from Sky/BBC HD to be honest.
As all of these formats are transport formats that carry encoded material at different rates and resolutions, and given the embryonic nature of HD encoding - it would be impossible to say one is a step up from the other.
I've encoded some HD-DVD that has ended up looking brilliant, and some that have looked poor. It's nothing to do with the format it's on.
Not forgetting the quality of the display - of which a large proportion of them are awful and subject to hasty (non-existent) calibrations.
LouBarlow
21-10-2006, 07:10
As all of these formats are transport formats that carry encoded material at different rates and resolutions, and given the embryonic nature of HD encoding - it would be impossible to say one is a step up from the other.
Errr, it's not impossible at all - all the HD-DVD titles I own look better than any Sky HD broadcast I've seen...whether it's down to bandwith or not is irrelevent.
Grandmaster
21-10-2006, 08:45
HD DVD will look better than Sky HD on equivalent sources. A lot better. Let's say you're going to compare Batman Begins on Sky HD with the HD DVD version.
The Sky HD version will be converted to 1080i/25, stored as a 50mbps MPEG2, then converted to MPEG4 for transmission. I would imagine this will be done automatically by a piece of hardware with very little in terms of quality assurance.
The HD DVD version on the other hand will be encoded to a better codec, VC1, straight from the uncompressed original source file. The encoding will be done by a trained professional with the movie's encoding scrutinised several times by "trained eyes" who will suggest tweaks to the compression in scenes that show artefacts to maximise picture quality. On top of that the HD DVD version will have better audio too along with interactive features etc.
No idea how BBC HD works but I did notice from screencaps that it looks like 1080i/25 interlaced but at a sub-optimal resolution like 1440x1080, stretched outwards to 1920x1080 similar to how anamorphic widescreen is stretched horizontally.
yeah Sky HD is way overcompressed, the same as most US HDTV stations too. I'll probably pop in to Lewis later today to check it out, but I'm already preparing myself for the worst as the titles are all MPEG2.
Blu-ray is as good as HD-DVD for quality on titles like Tears of the Sun and pretty soon is gonna be better than HD-DVD with 50gb discs starting to show.
Grandmaster
21-10-2006, 13:36
So long as an HD DVD is encoded with VC1, there is practically no way that BD will look better regardless of the amount of storage available. With VC1 if you throw something stupid like 20mbps of bandwidth at the movie, and then re-encode again at 25mbps you won't see a 25% improvement. You will see a 0% improvement.
The only conceivable way for BD to be better overall would be with audio - with that level of storage and the increased bandwidth, you could have multiple lossless audio tracks. Though why you would need more lossless audio channels than HD DVD can handle is beyond me.
MPEG2 titles like Tears of the Sun are only looking good because the source material is extremely compressible, therefore the lacklustre bandwidth available to a 25GB BD is enough to contain this particular movie. Indeed, I seem to recall that the DVD version of the movie fits on a single-layer DVD.
BD enthusiasts should forget about this obsession with capacity and concentrate instead on the one area where BD does have a tangible advantage - the potential of the Java programming language which is more advanced than HD DVD's HDi... only problem is that a) most authors don't know much Java, and b) er, I don't think any disks are available yet that actually do anything meaningful with BD-J.
thescrounger
21-10-2006, 13:54
yeah Sky HD is way overcompressed, the same as most US HDTV stations too. I'll probably pop in to Lewis later today to check it out, but I'm already preparing myself for the worst as the titles are all MPEG2.
It wasn't particularly the compression that was a problem. It was just a dull looking flat image. There just wasn't enough detail in the images.
So long as an HD DVD is encoded with VC1, there is practically no way that BD will look better regardless of the amount of storage available. With VC1 if you throw something stupid like 20mbps of bandwidth at the movie, and then re-encode again at 25mbps you won't see a 25% improvement. You will see a 0% improvement.
The only conceivable way for BD to be better overall would be with audio - with that level of storage and the increased bandwidth, you could have multiple lossless audio tracks. Though why you would need more lossless audio channels than HD DVD can handle is beyond me.
MPEG2 titles like Tears of the Sun are only looking good because the source material is extremely compressible, therefore the lacklustre bandwidth available to a 25GB BD is enough to contain this particular movie. Indeed, I seem to recall that the DVD version of the movie fits on a single-layer DVD.
BD enthusiasts should forget about this obsession with capacity and concentrate instead on the one area where BD does have a tangible advantage - the potential of the Java programming language which is more advanced than HD DVD's HDi... only problem is that a) most authors don't know much Java, and b) er, I don't think any disks are available yet that actually do anything meaningful with BD-J.
MPEG2 is gonna be all over at the end of the year. Obviously for 2 hour movies, there's no need for 50gb, but movies like LOTR will be able to put the movie on 1 disc using VC1 and PCM sound rather than on 2 discs for HD-DVD!
Yes, you make a good point about the BD-J, only Fox are gonna be making use of it in November but hopefully the rest will start soon.
I just saw the demo in John Lewis this afternoon and I thought it looked pretty damm good. Kingdom Of Heaven certainly did, as did X-Men...though when it went onto Fantasic 4 it looked pretty average. Seeing as the TV was only 1380x720 (or whatever), its pretty impressive! I'll be getting my PS3 in Jan, can't wait!
thescrounger
21-10-2006, 15:18
I wonder if the PS3 will be any good as a BD player?
I wonder if the PS3 will be any good as a BD player?
According to the Digital Bits's writer Bill Hunt, its suppose to be one of the best Blu-ray players.
thescrounger
21-10-2006, 15:52
Key word being 'supposed'. I doubt it will be better than a dedicated player like the Panasonic.
On an interesting related note, a number of our industry sources are telling us to expect the PS3 to one of the best - if not THE best - Blu-ray Disc players on the market initially, because the unit has apparently been put through very rigorous QC to test format spec and disc compatibility. We shall see.
Well, I know we shouldn't take what they say for granted, but thedigitalbits has some pretty good and honest sources. The first gen players don't even support some of the audio formats the PS3 does. It is a pretty feature heavy machine.
Errr, it's not impossible at all - all the HD-DVD titles I own look better than any Sky HD broadcast I've seen...whether it's down to bandwith or not is irrelevent.
And I've got some gash HD-DVD examples.
Just because sky isn't maximising what they could put out doesn't mean a good (unlikely) SKY broadcast couldn't be better than a badly conceived HD-DVD. (though, yes the SKY stuff has been pretty pants)
It's possible to encode something bad even if the transport is highly specced.
Maybe your HD-DVD collection doesn't cover all encoding possibilities, for instance the Goodfellas transfer is awful.
We regularly encode to VC-1, and yes I believe you can get some superb results for really low bit rates, likewise I've seen some nice MP2 (with high bit rates, so less efficient ) / h.264 hidef streams.
Blueray supports VC-1 anyway - I'm just not happy to compare things on a loose basis especially as the implementation of all formats varies so much.
Niceguygeoff
02-01-2007, 21:03
Got a good look at the Samsung Blu-ray deck today on a 52" 1080p Sony LCD. All I had to play was SWAT unfortunately, and if that's the state of their early efforts then I can see why HD-DVD has had the success that it's had.
This will in all likelihood change later on in the year as Blu-ray's big guns release some flagship titles (hell, I'd buy a Blu-ray machine tomorrow if Star Wars came with it too). But for the moment I can be content with my £280 HD-DVD and £2K plasma that comfortably outdoes £5k worth of kit. :D
splobber
02-01-2007, 23:01
I watched a Blu-Ray showcase disc earlier on and all it did was show itself up. Clip after clip was crud compared to most stuff on HD DVD.
playaslaya
04-01-2007, 13:42
I saw Blu Ray for the first time last week at John Lewis- it was on a Panasonic 65” 1080p plasma on a Panasonic BR player and I have to say I was really impressed. I had doubts the images would be good enough for a screen that big but it looked very good to me – they had a demo disc showing clips from Ice Age 2, X2 (strangely not X3?) and Walk The Line. X3 and Ice Age in particular both looked stunning.
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