tausifs
Prominent Member
is the lumagen good at detecting the PAL 2:2 pulldown ? I want to feed it 576i over HDMI so it properly scales up to 1080p50.
It's pretty good. In "auto" mode it tends to err towards film rather than towards video, so for a DVD movie you can be pretty sure it will stay in film mode all the time. For video material it will occasionally slip into film mode, but it's fairly reliable.is the lumagen good at detecting the PAL 2:2 pulldown ? I want to feed it 576i over HDMI so it properly scales up to 1080p50.
It's pretty good. In "auto" mode it tends to err towards film rather than towards video, so for a DVD movie you can be pretty sure it will stay in film mode all the time. For video material it will occasionally slip into film mode, but it's fairly reliable.
You do, of course, have the option to lock it into Film or Video mode rather than having it decide on the fly; I quite often do this unless I'm watching something which is actually a mixture of film and video (like a "making of" documentary).
Make sure you are using a DVD player which is outputting the original 576i via HDMI. Denons have been guilty of for some reason deinterlacing and then reinterlacing for HDMI output and so even with the Lumagen correctly 2:2 it back together an artefact created by the Denon is already inherent in the signal.
I am a little tempted to go for a s300, seeing as they seem to go for less than ÂŁ150 used on the classifieds !
Was the slowness why you got rid of your S300, or was it something else about it that bugged you ?
I had a Sharp HP20 BD player but sold it because of what I felt was white crush , that I found unbearable to watch, and I had diligently given it 2 fw updates. I have never seen white crush with my trusty HD-A1 HD-DVD player !
I ended up selling my Sharp at a loss of about ÂŁ100. Once bitten , twice shy- I am now reluctant to buy a brand new BD player, should I have to sell it on for a similar loss.
My main reasons for getting rid were operational performance and HD audio codec support.
AVI
could you elaborate on what exactly you mean by operational performance ? just the slowness or any pq issue too ?
I just remembered that with my HD-A1 outputing a NTSC disc at 480i over component, I saw macroblocking. This makes me wonder whether the Lumagen could cause macroblocking when fed 576i over HDMI.
It difficult to say without knowing if it was a source compression issue and what else was happening to the signal and to what display. As the old saying goes you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear....
If SD DVD performance is critical and you don't want to spend a lot I would suggest looking at an Oppo as a transport for DVD playback.
AVI
That would surprise me. Macroblocking can be the result of buggy MPEG2 decoding or (more likely) an over-compressed signal, but both of those possibilities happen well upstream of the scaler. If anything, Lumagen's proprietary scaling method tends to make macro-blocking slightly less obvious than most other scaling algorithms do.This makes me wonder whether the Lumagen could cause macroblocking when fed 576i over HDMI.
When I played the same SD disc at 1080i via HDMI, there was absolutely no macroblocking to be seen with the lumagen deinterlacing to 1080p24, but there was if it was fed 480i over component. Does this suggest anything to you ?
I was watching on a 1080p pioneer plasma in dot-by-dot mode.