[Barny79]

Best picture, reliability etc

http://www.richersounds.com/index.ph....php&p=sd220r2

Tosh SD220.

[ferris57]

Or even the tosh sd 330. £98 with a free scart lead (crappy lead of course....but free!)

[Gary Lightfoot]

If you can stretch to £120, the Panasonic S75 is available from digitalpoint for £120 inclusing postage.

Gary.

[bonzobanana]

Originally posted by Barny79
Best picture, reliability etc

Best picture seems to be the Toshiba 330 as its highly rated and competes with models costing 10x more at least for picture quality. Reliability not sure on. Toshiba now have them made for them in China to their specifications.

[SOUNDSTYLE]

I have the Tosh 330 and for the money you can't go wrong.
The picture is unbelievable for the money.

[shoestring25]

Me personally I wouldn't choose a Toshiba player the tosh 220 has trouble with seamless branching and most important of all is a feature that I think is overlooked the ability to output a pal 60 picture from a region 1 disc. By displaying a pal 60 picture instead of an inferior NTSC the r1 picture looks as good as a pal picture from your region 2.

Toshiba and Sony players not output pal 60 but Panasonic and pioneer players do so I would pick a cheep one of those up.

cheers

Talking balony there mate (reg. converting NTSC to PAL 60 is superior)

You don't want to convert NTSC to PAL 60. You want to leave it as NTSC, 60hz.

[NicolasB]

But converting the picture to PAL magically adds an extra hundred lines of resolution to every image!

In fairness, there may be cases where the player does a better job than the television of scaling an NTSC image up to PAL resolution, but yeah, I wouldn't expect it to make much odds most of the time.

[shoestring25]

normal pal is superior to NTSC correct?

well a pal 60 picture looks the same as a normal pal picture.

NTSC picures i have always found look less detailed and the colour is not as good

every player i have ever owned has had the ability to output both a pure NTSC or a PAL 60 picture and the PAL 60 has always looked better.

cheers

There's more to it than that.

Checkout the various R1 v R2 & PAL v NTSC threads.

[Nic Rhodes]

Originally posted by miller25
normal pal is superior to NTSC correct?

Why? Ever worked out the bandwidth calculations for PAL vs NTSC DVD signals? They are virtually identical. Just argueing one has more lines than the other is only a tiny part of the equation. I would leave NTSC 60 Hz as just that and not convert to PAL. It just causes to many problems.

Another Toshiba vote, £80 is a bargain and I have never seen any problems in the players I have seen.

I do have a soft spot for Panasonic machines, just wish the SPDIF was better quality though

Pal 60 is superior to NTSC just for the fact that PAl has a superior colour system. The only thing different between PAL 60 and NTSC is the colour system used, the amounts of lines and resoloution remain exactly the same. Also note there is no 'conversion' when you output Pal 60 as some may think, the dvd layer just outputs it as you tell it to and doesn't perform any type of conversion. Most people probably wouldn't notice the difference anyway but Pal 60 is superior, even tho I have never noticed the difference either.

[Nic Rhodes]

Can't say I am convinced by this, if it is so superior why doesn't evey player do this as standard rather than just a few cheapo players to deal with older tellys that have NTSC problems?

Originally posted by The Beekeeper
Can't say I am convinced by this, if it is so superior why doesn't evey player do this as standard rather than just a few cheapo players to deal with older tellys that have NTSC problems?

Who said it was so superior?, I said it was virtually the same and that most including me will not notice the difference, as I said before the ONLY difference is the colour system used, same resoloution, same amount of lines and still at 60hz, same frame rate,everything,but just with the Pal colour system.

Taken from a site:

"PAL and NTSC are words and formats that are applied to DVD for convenience, and because of historical convention. There is nothing fundamental about a DVD which makes it either PAL or NTSC, but for simplicity and brevity, I will continue to use these terms throughout this article.

At their heart, DVDs are merely carriers of data files with compressed audio-visual information contained therein. This information can be placed on DVD in one of two resolutions; 720 x 576 pixels (PAL DVDs), or 720 x 480 pixels (NTSC DVDs), and with various frame rates (24, 25, and 30 frames per second are common). The DVD player itself takes this data file and formats it appropriately for display in either PAL or NTSC."

With Dvd players capable of Pal 60 they just output it in PAL 60. Some TV's can't even do PAl 60!. There is no conversion.

[Nic Rhodes]

and that is suppose to convince me of superor performance?

Why is it better? I can't see why you are promoting PAL 60? Genuine interest here but I just can't se why?

I'm not promoting Pal 60, sorry if there's any confusion! For all intents and puposes from what I have read and been told NTSC and PAL 60 are exactly the same. I think Pal technically just has a better colour system but when it comes to what you actual see on screen I don't think there is really any difference.

This is what was said on another forum:



one_one
Member

Registered: Jun 2003
Location:
Posts: 40
Pal 60?
What exactly is Pal 60? I know it's for playing NTSC disk but is it any good? Whats better, watching on a proper NTSC output or watching Pal 60? what are the differences?



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21-06-2003 13:40



Napoleon
Senior Member

Registered: Jan 2001
Location: New Labours Screwed Up Kingdom,where the madness never ends,it just evolves.
Posts: 1981
As far asi know it is the NTSC television standard with Pal colour,converted by the player.



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21-06-2003 15:28



one_one
Member

Registered: Jun 2003
Location:
Posts: 40
So which is better or are they the same? It seems my old player may have done this conversion as when on Pal and NTSC it would seem to output exactly the same picture yet when on NTSC the coloures were very bright and I had to turn the colour down on my TV.



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21-06-2003 17:07



Napoleon
Senior Member

Registered: Jan 2001
Location: New Labours Screwed Up Kingdom,where the madness never ends,it just evolves.
Posts: 1981
All things being equal it is better to have no conversion,ie 'pure' NTSC; it is possible of course that the picture may look better with conversion,as players,tvs are never the same in many ways.Pal 60 is a compromise between Pal/NTSC.



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21-06-2003 23:46



LV426
Senior Member

Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Somewhere in South Yorkshire
Posts: 577
When a DVD player outputs a PAL60 signal from a US or Japanese DVD, NO CONVERSION from NTSC to PAL TAKES PLACE. The signal is not stored on the DVD as NTSC or PAL - something else called YUV. Either way, it is converted, just once, to whatever output you ask for. So 'conversion' will not degrade the image because there isn't any.

The same is NOT true of NTSC videotapes, etc.

To answer the question - there are those that believe that PAL has the ability to resolve greater subtleties of colour than NTSC. I've never seen any visible difference.



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22-06-2003 06:33



one_one
Member

Registered: Jun 2003
Location:
Posts: 40
Intresting, I've also heard that Pal is slightly better when it comes to coloure, although I too have never noticed much diference. But in theory if this is true outputting in Pal 60 is better than outputting than in NTSC.



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22-06-2003 09:21



AndyWilson
--------old-geek

Registered: Jun 2000
Location: Hastings, UK
Posts: 3459
In theory PAL60 will give a better picture than NTSC because there is more colour bandwidth. Be hard pressed to notice it though in most circumstances.



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22-06-2003 09:51



SheepDip
It's grim oop north!

Registered: Apr 2001
Location: Yorkshire
Posts: 1402
I can tell a difference in PAL colour and NTSC colour - the givaway is to look for fleshtones, white skin looks slightly redder than it should (Known in technical circles as the "Alex Ferguson affect - OK so I made that up). It's not a huge thing though.
As already said though - PAL60 is not a conversion, there is no degredation therefore whatsoever and the general thought is that it is preferable to watch than pure NTSC.
Better still though is of course to output RGB which is nearer the pure signal stored on the DVD, or component which IS the pure signal.



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22-06-2003 11:20



one_one
Member

Registered: Jun 2003
Location:
Posts: 40
Thanks for the info! I always output in RGB. Don't think my DVD has component inputs? what do they look like. Pal 60 might give be a deciding factor if all else seems to be pretty equal.



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22-06-2003 13:07



EZRyder
Member

Registered: May 2003
Location: North Wales
Posts: 31
quote:
Originally posted by SheepDip
I can tell a difference in PAL colour and NTSC colour - the givaway is to look for fleshtones, white skin looks slightly redder than it should (Known in technical circles as the "Alex Ferguson affect




I always thought that NTSC meant Never Twice the Same Colour !


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22-06-2003 14:06



one_one
Member

Registered: Jun 2003
Location:
Posts: 40
Do all pioneer dvd players do Pal 60, it doesn't say it anywhere on the pioneer site about the 360 but on other sites it does and in the 360 mannually it mentions mod pal, is this pal 60?



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22-06-2003 14:35



LV426
Senior Member

Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Somewhere in South Yorkshire
Posts: 577
quote:
Originally posted by EZRyder
I always thought that NTSC meant Never Twice the Same Colour !




Well, it sort of does. Which is why TVs when running in NTSC mode have a 'hue' control.

Actually, the changing colour artefact arises only in NTSC broadcast signals - not those from a stable source such as DVD. In the same sorts of circumstances that we might see ghosting or co-channel interference (etc) an NTSC signal might also show wide variations in the colour.


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22-06-2003 16:04



EZRyder
Member

Registered: May 2003
Location: North Wales
Posts: 31
quote:
Originally posted by LV426
Actually, the changing colour artefact arises only in NTSC broadcast signals - not those from a stable source such as DVD.




My previous post was a rather feeble attempt at a joke. I must admit that having seen broadcasts in the States whilst on holiday(and ignoring the rather mediocre programme content), the NTSC standard is as good as PAL IMO.


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22-06-2003 18:12



LIGHTRAY
Drowning not waving

Registered: Aug 2001
Location: Somewhere out there
Posts: 304
As an aside:

My aging Mitsibushi tv has a function on a onscreen menu wherein you can change the picture from Pal 60, (which it dispalys as default for R1 discs) to Pal 50 !

Although the quality of the picture is the same, there is noticably
more of the film displayed on screen at the left and right hand edges !

Like I say, this tv is 5 years old, but I have never seen this feature
available on any new (more expensive) tv my friends/relatives have bought in the last 5 years.

The disappointing thing is, I am about to upgrade to a new tv, and can't find this feature on any new tv I've looked it at, even the ones with lots of other bells and whistles on.


Last edited by LIGHTRAY on 24-06-2003 at 07:38



My fianl opinion is the Pal 60 and NTSC are basically the same.