fallinlight
Distinguished Member
Not everyone is of the opinion that the pannasonics are crap
See this excerpt from post #83 on the Spears and Munsil UHD disc thread, written by Stacey Spears himself
"Some sources are better or worse than others.
1. OPPO - Pretty common chroma as it looks like bilinear is used to convert from 4:2:0 to 4:2:2 / 4:4:4.
2. XB1 S/X - Chroma is not great. Internally it converts everything to RGB and then if you turn on YCbCr output, it will convert back just before output. This results in a loss of chroma resolution. Again, we start with 4:2:0, so somehow we end up less than that even though we are still outputting something greater.
3. Panasonic - They do something more than bilinear and there chroma is the best of any player on the market. Has been for years."
I was told that the above talks about chroma algoritems that might no longer be relevant due to new firmware on players. I am also told that the Pannasonic's have such massive ringing on the chroma that it is a joke. Apparently this can be due to algorithms that introduce ringing and other artefacts, whilst (algorithms I assume) others do not and stay more simple. Some reasoning behind this is that chroma is only 25% of the luma resolution on disc, 4:2:0, that does not magically get 4:4:4 without processing, and its impossible to recreate something that was never there.
I appreciate the notes but I have not one clue what any of this means! At this stage I am starting to go numb.
nd didn't notice any difference in picture quality (although it must be mentioned that i never tried comparing the two up close).
This is the thing, I noted a sharper and more detailed image with my UB9000 over my Sony X700 - whether or not it is over sharpened. After what I was told about the Panny's being so poor, I would like to compare side by side with the Sony and or some other players to see if I feel it is too aggressive, though.
That said, I did notice things such as colour definition and tone being what I thought was superior to my X700 and quite awe inspiring, for example Ancient One's (Tilda Swinton) gold garments in Endgame, when Hulk/ Banner is talking to her on the roof top. The richness of the material and colour really stood out.
I think it definately depends on everything else in your chain, especially your display, image size, seating distance visual acuity. I view at 120" 16:9 diagonal at around 3.3 meters distance. I can tell the difference of 4K on a 60" TV, but but I do not start to notice the true benefits of 4K until around 100" 16:9 diagonal, I think around this image size and up is when 4K images really shines.
One major downside to the Xbox was the noise when playing a UHD disc.
I am with you there, will be the same with the XB1X, too from what I read. Yes, I am very sensitive to noise and have very good hearing. So, this is a priority for me, even with my player rear left of MLP, which nulls high frequencies the most.
I will say however, there is always unit variation and I went through a few XB1S to get one that was very good with system/ operational noise - I remember it being absolutely fine for UHD playback, actually. Same with the release PS4 and PS4 Pro, once I landed a good one, it was much nicer to use. It is hard to gauge what my XB1S's noise was like from memory now, especially in comparison to by UB9000, yet alone my X700 and I only had that up till one week ago.
I did a/ b extensively last night with my UB820 and the UB9000 is slightly quieter, but it is just enough to make quiet scenes at the start of a new disc layer/ layer change to be more pleasant viewing. Both have some minor normal varying whine at start of discs layer changes and the 9000 is perhaps slightly worse in this regard depending on where you are orientated to the player.