Seen HDDVD today

Oakleyspatz said:
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:

Apparently a lot of the popular, cheaper 720/768 panel sets treat 1080i as 540p when doing their 'deinterlacing' and scaling.

Until mass-market sets start handling this conversion better, it's likely that a lot of the potential of HD will be lost for viewers. Alternatively, the player manufacturers could work on doing a really good 720p conversion in the player, bypassing the set's scaler/deinterlacer.

Gav
 
Its easy to see if its sets wrong, it tells you the resolution it is working at on the front display.....

I would guess it says 720p (or worse!) on the front if its like you say.
 
i'd imagine that's gotta be it - go in and ask the guy to check the output and if its set to 720, change it to 1080 and watch his jaw hit the floor and get ready to listen to a load of stammering waffle (not that there's anything wrong with stammering, its just that's what happens when fools realise they're talking ****... ) then take over as manager of the shop and set every other display up for all us others who know what to expect but can't get to see it in action due to clueless idiots...

(but if display is set to 1080, then I take everything I said here back and denounce any hi-def as the devil's work... :D
 
redtom said:
(but if display is set to 1080, then I take everything I said here back and denounce any hi-def as the devil's work... :D

Or at the very least, blame Sony.....HD-DVD looks amazing on most peoples displays once set to 1080i.
 
brandondanger said:
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.


well i buy all my a/v gear from this shop and they are always top notch when it comes to things a/v so i'm a little surprised that they would have such a bad setup. will have to get over there and have a look for myself.

neil.
 
redtom said:
i'd imagine that's gotta be it - go in and ask the guy to check the output and if its set to 720, change it to 1080 and watch his jaw hit the floor and get ready to listen to a load of stammering waffle (not that there's anything wrong with stammering, its just that's what happens when fools realise they're talking ****... ) then take over as manager of the shop and set every other display up for all us others who know what to expect but can't get to see it in action due to clueless idiots...

(but if display is set to 1080, then I take everything I said here back and denounce any hi-def as the devil's work... :D

As you said first, it's the players output that should be set to 1080. Avoid 720 at all cost. Obviously it's a good idea to have the display set to the same but even when you use 720/768 displays the Toshiba should be set to 1080 output.

The problems the original poster reported sounds exactly like it looks when set to 720.
 
neil, have a look and tell me what you think... ive bought a lot of stuff from this shop from the past and adrian (the manager) has always served me/ given great advice etc... i spoke to someone different (he looked like james may off top gear), he was adamant it was how it should look.. anyway, knowing my luck hes had a fiddle with it after id gone and ill look like a complete pillock.:rotfl:
 
In my experiencew 720p looks better than 1080i. I dont like non progressive images. The trouble with 1080 fixed resolution displays is that they tend to make most SD material look naff. So until the majority of source material is 720p and above I wouldnt be in a rush to get a 1080 fixed resolution display. Just my penneth:)
 
Just for curiosity brandondanger, where is this shop? I have seen the HD A1 in London in Totenham Court Road connected via composite to a 50 i Pioneer and the pq was less then impressive. To my experience are most shops in this street don't have too knowledgeable staff. Although one of them must have thought of an HD DVD player in first place. :D
 
I've got an XA1 and a Sony X-Series and I can confirm that at 1080i the pictures are stunning. I haven't had a single person that hasn't said wow, the moment I put a disc on, so I think the shop had everything set up wrong. Though like someone said, Perfect Storm isn't the greatest HD-DVD to show off....Serenity on the other hand.....AMAZING!!! As all HD-DVD discs are encoded at 1080p, the resolution needs to be set to 1080i as it's the closest res to the native of the disc (it even says it in the Toshiba manual). If they have set it at 1080i, then god knows what they've done...and may god have mercy on us all :D.
 
I notice that Brandondanger has a Sharp 32P50E and that is HD compatible and not HD ready. I have the 26" version of this. Will the HD player still look better than a normal dvd player?

This whole 1080i, 720p... blah vblah blah is confusing stuff. Can someone explain please.

I also read in one of the what TV magazines ages ago that unless you have a 32" TV or bigger then you cant really get the great HD. ie the bigger the TV the better and if you got 26" or smaller (tv that is) you should not bother with HD.
 
there is nothing wrong with the sony(picture wise)its prob the best lcd on the market.;)
They must have it set up wrong:smashin:
 
Looks like firmware 2.0 has fixed 720p problem. It also adds Dolby TrueHD 5.1 sound. Excellent!!
 
colinb07958 said:
I notice that Brandondanger has a Sharp 32P50E and that is HD compatible and not HD ready. I have the 26" version of this. Will the HD player still look better than a normal dvd player?

This whole 1080i, 720p... blah vblah blah is confusing stuff. Can someone explain please.

I also read in one of the what TV magazines ages ago that unless you have a 32" TV or bigger then you cant really get the great HD. ie the bigger the TV the better and if you got 26" or smaller (tv that is) you should not bother with HD.

IMO an HD movie will still look better than a DVD on any size screen. It's only when you get to the bigger screens that the big differences are apparent. It's all down to the viewing distance. If you are sitting 1m away from a 28" TV, the differences are there. However if you sit 2-3m away, there's still some difference, but it's not so apparent. The further away you get, the less perceived detail there is, so there is some truth in not being able to notice the difference on smaller TV's. I hope that made some sense lol.

The main resolutions of HD are 720p, 1080i and 1080p (And some upscaling players can do 768p too). The "i" stands for interlaced. So in the case of 1080i, the picture is actually made up of 2 lots of 540 lines, which alternate every frame. p stands for progressive, which means that the number quoted is the number of lines on the screen at any one time. So 720p = 720 lines, 1080p = 1080 lines. The reason why we output HD-DVD films (Which are in 1080p) at 1080i is because a: There isn't an HD-DVD player which can output the signal and b: It is the closest resolution to the native of the disc. It's much easier for the player to just output the 1080i than 720p because it doesn't have to downscale the picture, then upscale it. The less done to the picture the better.

Hopefully that's explained a bit. Probably a bit of a mindless ramble and someone will come up with a better explanation I'm sure.
 
derann have been going for years (used to sell films when they were on film!)
i had a import toshiba 2107 dvd player off them when dvd was launched in the u.s.
while sometimes they dont know every nut and bolt of a product i would be suprised if the set up was that far out.
 
colinb07958 said:
ie the bigger the TV the better and if you got 26" or smaller (tv that is) you should not bother with HD.

I've got a 26" LCD TV and I can tell you that the difference between SD and HD is more than noticable. Obviously, it's not the enormous improvement you'd get on a 50" screen but it's at least twice as good and well worth the upgrade.

One thing people forget is that HD offers more than just improved resolutions but also superior colours and cleanliness of image.
 
markwpage said:
One thing people forget is that HD offers more than just improved resolutions but also superior colours and cleanliness of image.

Here we go again. The colour is little different to what you will get from dvd. The benefits of high definition are primarily resolution. Colour , intensity range are very firmly still in the 8bit video domain.
 
sly, i used to go in when they had a big vhs department down the steps. now im showing my age... i agree, they are always pretty knowledgable, but adrian wasnt there, the guy i spoke to wasnt the sharpest tool in the box, i should have asked for the remotes for both and had a play but i hadnt got that much time... i have never doubted the quality thats being delivered but something was wrong, i just cant wait to see it properly set up!!!:clap:
 
Mr.D said:
Here we go again. The colour is little different to what you will get from dvd. The benefits of high definition are primarily resolution. Colour , intensity range are very firmly still in the 8bit video domain.

Though the intensity range of HD does indeed remain 8-bit, superior resolution implies better colour response simply because there are more pixels and therefore more colours on screen at once. As such, a shot-by-shot comparison of a still image would give the impression of the HD version carrying more colour. For example, if you took a 480-line picture from a 1080-line source you would be omitting resolution and therefore detail containing more colours that would be lost in the compression.

The intensity of colour is the same but the quantity is greater so the depth of colour appears to be more profound.
 
markwpage said:
Though the intensity range of HD does indeed remain 8-bit, superior resolution implies better colour response simply because there are more pixels and therefore more colours on screen at once. As such, a shot-by-shot comparison of a still image would give the impression of the HD version carrying more colour. For example, if you took a 480-line picture from a 1080-line source you would be omitting resolution and therefore detail containing more colours that would be lost in the compression.

The intensity of colour is the same but the quantity is greater so the depth of colour appears to be more profound.

I have been through this numerous times with numerous people , colour does not equate with resolution . The benefits of HD are all primarily resolution . I have done side by side appraisals of hd vs sd images to illustrate this in the past.

Its sloppy in the extreme for people to repeat that the colour is better with HD. Its just yet another thing that people have to demystify.
 
Mr.D said:
I have been through this numerous times with numerous people , colour does not equate with resolution . The benefits of HD are all primarily resolution . I have done side by side appraisals of hd vs sd images to illustrate this in the past.

Its sloppy in the extreme for people to repeat that the colour is better with HD. Its just yet another thing that people have to demystify.

Yes, but my point is not that there are more colours per pixel but that there are more pixels for colours to be shown. If you took an image with 1 million pixels at 8-bit response and converted it to an image with 200,000 pixels at 8-bit response and then showed them on the same high-resolution screen, the 1 million pixel image would look like it had better colours because there would be far more of them being shown simultaneously. Not on each pixel, of course, but as a whole it would be showing 800,000 pixels worth of extra detail composed of colours that are left out of the lower resolution image.

So, yes you're right in saying colours aren't "better" but they're more numerous so the image is more colourful.
 
The effect you are talking about only becomes apparant on hugely different resolutions , sd vs HD is not enough especially at 8bit 4:2:0 colour to show any significant improvement in colour. The human eye is very insensitive to colour detail.

Having looked at lots of HD material it looks little if any better colourwise compared with SD , it still looks like 8 bit colour video there is no particularly noticable improvement in colour performance with HD.

Please don't persist with this line of reasoning , its probably the one oft repeated myth about hd that gets me angry as I appraise colour for a living.
 
Again, I'm not talking about colour response, I'm talking about perception in regards to increased detail. If you blur your eyes when looking at something with a lot of colour, what happens? The colours blend together creating the perception of less colour as well as less detail, and in some cases a different colour is perceived altogether. A colour registering instrument would not notice this effect as it would observe the differences between the colours on a pixel to pixel basis. For example, if you look at something red with white detail and blur it, the depth of the red is lessened due to the intrusion of the surrounding white. If you used an instrument to record this colour it would not be noticed as the red and white would remain separate but the human eye - not being able to decipher detail as successfully as a machine like you say - would perceive the lack of detail as a slightly different colour.

Another real world example can be seen through astronomy. If you looked at the Earth from Mars you would see it as a blue dot. This is because the eye cannot resolve the detail which would enable it to see the green land. Moving even closer you would see the white clouds, closer yet and you'd see a whole miriad of colours. Now, replace distance with resolution and you should see what I'm getting at.

The human eye is certainly adept enough to observe correct colour through increased detail at HD resolutions which is why a larger screen often offers better results than a smaller one. An SD image on a large screen would be significantly more blurred than a HD image, the blurring altering the perception of colour on the image.

As such, an image with little detail and vivid colours in HD would, as you point out, look essentially the same in SD as the actual colour depth is the same.

This is certainly not anything that requires, or is even possible to record, with technical appraisal as it's a subjective phenomenon that occurs due the way the eye perceives the surrounding world. It's no coincidence that people other than myself say that HD has 'better colour'. As we've agreed, it doesn't, but in my opinion it looks as though it does because of the way the eye sees the colour.

I'm not going to add to this discussion any more because I feel I have made my point as clearly as I can. That is; if there's more detail shown, there's more colour seen. But there isn't really more colour, there's only more perceived colour.
 
markwpage said:
I'm not going to add to this discussion any more because I feel I have made my point as clearly as I can. That is; if there's more detail shown, there's more colour seen. But there isn't really more colour, there's only more perceived colour.

And as I've said and as I don't really want to go in and rip apart every single one of your rationales: as I've had to do in the past with other people who cannot differentiate a resolution effect from a colour one , resolution does not equate to colour and your astronomy example is an extreme situation as I've already alluded to in a previous post. SD to HD the colour performance is pretty similar , if HD looks particularly better colourwise relative to SD on your kit I suggest you get it recalibrated.
 

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