Seen HDDVD today

brandondanger

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popped into my local specialist dealers today with wide eyes, ax1 was playing perfect storm on a 1080 40inch sony screen and the picture was crap! jagged lines around peoples faces, grainy backgrounds. it was awful! it was running through hdmi but i asked i asked the guy if it was set up properly and he said i was and that i was standing too close! then he put serenity on and it was just as bad! i have telewest hd on a 32inch non hd sharp and the picture is amazing, please tell me that the tv in the shop was set up wrong! from what ive read on here the picture of a 1080i hddvd should be amazing not look like a normal dvd playing on a £12machine. i think ill have to wait for something to compare it with.... i was all excited as well:(
 
please tell me that the tv in the shop was set up wrong!
I think that is a fairly safe assumption.
 
I take it the Sony is LCD, perhaps you should go back and ask him to hook it up to a Pioneer or Panasonic Plasma and run the HD-DVD player at 1080i, it should look a whole lot better, (I hope :eek: )

Rooster-X
 
I've seen both films and they look outstanding with my XA-1 and sagem.
 
i dont think thats the problem rooster, ive got an lcd and its great. i just think it was maybe running with full noise reduction, maybe at the wrong resolution etc... thank god for that.
 
Well I have the HD-A1 and trust me you will notice a difference when playing on a decent set up (mine is through HDMI to a Panny 50") and everyone who has seen it in action is gobsmacked at the PQ :smashin: Try and find somewhere else doing a demo:lease:
 
brandondanger said:
i dont think thats the problem rooster, ive got an lcd and its great. i just think it was maybe running with full noise reduction, maybe at the wrong resolution etc... thank god for that.

Well maybe its just set up really badly, I don't know without seeing it. Anyone else out there with an HD player and a Sony LCD?
 
why you say that steveo? just saying what i saw...
 
brandondanger said:
popped into my local specialist dealers today with wide eyes, ax1 was playing perfect storm on a 1080 40inch sony screen and the picture was crap! jagged lines around peoples faces, grainy backgrounds. it was awful! it was running through hdmi but i asked i asked the guy if it was set up properly and he said i was and that i was standing too close! then he put serenity on and it was just as bad! i have telewest hd on a 32inch non hd sharp and the picture is amazing, please tell me that the tv in the shop was set up wrong! from what ive read on here the picture of a 1080i hddvd should be amazing not look like a normal dvd playing on a £12machine. i think ill have to wait for something to compare it with.... i was all excited as well:(


br fan are we ?

even from quick glimpse I had this morning with newly arrived player the picture was stunning both on 50" DLP and 92" screen via LCD PJ
 
what? did you even read my original post? the picture wasnt very good, hence this is why i was asking if the tv was set up properly. im not a fanboy, im just asking the question. and as its the first hddvd player ive ever seen i was expecting more.... i know what my telewest hd looks like and this was nowhere near, have a look for yourself, high street, dudley, the shops called durrans.
 
when i said ill have to wait for something to compare it with i meant another hddvd player, with a different tv, not a br player...
 
You would like to try this on the Pioneer 1080p plasma, but to be honest there is a real lack of good 1080 displays.
Playing a 1080p source on a 720p display isn't necessarily better than playing a 720p source on the same display. In fact, it is usually worse since downscaling from 1080 to 720 usually isn't prettily done.
In fact, showing 1080 on a 720 display can even be worse than displaying DVD on the 720 display, providing you have a good dvd scaler.

Once there is a load of 1080 plasmas at £3000 and high-end ones for £4000 we will start to see a real difference. Same holds for projectors. Once, 1080 projectors are at £2000 a high-end version at £4-5000 should do a superb job in displaying 1080p.

So far, the only display I liked for watching 1080p sources is a Barco projector, and a 1080p LCD display with 1ms response time. However, the LCD was only 20" so no cinema experience there...
 
Are you sure they had it setup for 1080i output? I have read that 720p looks terrible because it scales up down to 480p then scales upto 720p. My HDA1 looks awesome on my Hitachi TX200 projector.
 
the sony display that was running was £4k, 1080 so i can only assume that the player was set to the wrong resolution.
 
KenX said:
In fact, it is usually worse since downscaling from 1080 to 720 usually isn't prettily done.
In fact, showing 1080 on a 720 display can even be worse than displaying DVD on the 720 display, providing you have a good dvd scaler.

...

Now you my friend are either a wind up merchant , registered blind , a crack smoker or possibly all three.
 
Mr.D said:
Now you my friend are either a wind up merchant , registered blind , a crack smoker or possibly all three.
:rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:
 
Right did a experiment. Changed the resolution to 720p on my HDA1 and I can confirm it looks crap. The toshiba doesn't scale to 720p very well. My projector is 720p native but I use 1080i output and let the projector do its own scaling. It looks fantastic compared to anything I've seen. Even scaled up DVD looks great on it. I suggest you go back to shop and get a proper demo with 1080i output. If that doesn't impress you, I think the screen is at fault.
 
i was never critisizing the hddvd player, and being called a fanboy hurt! :D i expected it to be much better than my hd cable whether it be br or hddvd, and just for the record i intend to get a uk hddvd player when they are released. my original point was that the tv must be set up wrong... it annoyed me that the guy in the shop insisted i was too close! surley thats the whole point of hd, big screen close up great picture...
 
Well to be honest The Perfect Storm isnt the best example of HD-DVD you will ever see, but Serenity would look good on a 14" B&W tv :D
Can only assume the shop had it setup wrong (although its not exactly difficult to setup). In fact if it was one of Sony's new 1080 screens they should be ashamed of themselves. I've seen them showing HD and they looked pretty good to me. Certainly the best LCD I've seen.
 
brandondanger said:
i was never criticizing the DVD player, and being called a fanboy hurt! :D i expected it to be much better than my hd cable whether it be br or DVD, and just for the record i intend to get a uk DVD player when they are released. my original point was that the tv must be set up wrong... it annoyed me that the guy in the shop insisted i was too close! surely that's the whole point of hd, big screen close up great picture...
HTML:

do you need glass to get that close?:rotfl: i do and i have one a1 that is ..and i am a fan boy..there i have come out of the closet:rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:
 
rooster-x said:
Well maybe its just set up really badly, I don't know without seeing it. Anyone else out there with an HD player and a Sony LCD?
well i have a SONY BRAVIA KDL32A12U with a TOSHIBA HD-XA1PLAYER connected with HDMI 1080I and when watching HD SERENITY the picture is awsome...same to goes for HD DOOM....the TOSHIBA player is that good ive started watching alot of my old region 1 dvds(battlestar galactica,space above and beyound)etc etc...the only thing i can fault the tv is some time when the picture is dark,black can sometime look a little grey...
 
brandondanger said:
it annoyed me that the guy in the shop insisted i was too close! surley thats the whole point of hd, big screen close up great picture...
The sales guy is a clueless imbecile. Unless you're veiwing on something really really big like a 90" screen, then viewing distance issues are extinct.
 
It was probably the Sony Bravia KDL-46X2000 1080p HD LCD TV.
I have not seen this model in action, but I have seen plenty of other 720p HD LCD Bravia models and have been decidedly unimpressed with them all. Images look totally un-natural and very 'digitized'. They have had awful motion smearing and terrible artificial edge-enhancement.
LCD as a technology suffers from all of these issues to some extent compared to Plasma and DLP and of course CRT, but the Bravias seem to suffer considerably more than most!.....In my opinion of course!! ;)
 
KenX said:
You would like to try this on the Pioneer 1080p plasma, but to be honest there is a real lack of good 1080 displays.
Playing a 1080p source on a 720p display isn't necessarily better than playing a 720p source on the same display. In fact, it is usually worse since downscaling from 1080 to 720 usually isn't prettily done.
In fact, showing 1080 on a 720 display can even be worse than displaying DVD on the 720 display, providing you have a good dvd scaler.
I also have to disagree with this comment. A few years ago then maybe scaling 1080i/p to 720 would have resulted in a worse image than upscaling 576p to 720p but nowadays, the quality of scalers have improved considerably in even budget displays ( The £1200 H72i has a top Faroudja DCDi inside) and any half decent scaler will produce a much better image down scaling 1080 lines to 720 than upscaling 480 or 576 lines to 720.
For example, SkyHD looks much better when outputting 1080i to my 720p projector than outputting 720p from the HD box !! I can only assume it is because the scaler in my PJ is better than the scaler in the SKYHD box as all SkyHD transmissions are currently in 1080i
Go figure! :confused:
 

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