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Anyone own a Bluray or HD DVD player?

 
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gsxr750r



Joined: 29 Jan 2007

PostPosted: Wed Feb 07, 2007 5:44 am    Post subject: Anyone own a Bluray or HD DVD player? Reply with quote

Thoughts on either of these? As soon as I'm convinced one is winning, I read an article that the other is winning as a format.

Anyone own a PS3? I read that XBox 360's add-on will be available in Korea next month (from Xbox literature). Finally. I suppose they figure Samsung and LG have gouged enough early-adopters to finally allow it.
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gsxr750r



Joined: 29 Jan 2007

PostPosted: Wed Feb 07, 2007 8:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sounds like the Samsung players are getting some bad reviews due to a very big bug:

http://www.dvdtown.com/news/consumeralertsamsungbdp1000blurayplayers/4303
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gsxr750r



Joined: 29 Jan 2007

PostPosted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 3:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I just got back from Costco near Sangbon station in Seoul, where the Samsung BP1000 (I think that was the number) Blu-ray player was demoed at 1080p (same resolution as my set). The TV was a 50" Full HD Samsung PAVV model. I was shocked. Not by the great quality, but by the poor video conversion quality used in making the demo disk. The TV was not set up perfect, but it wasn't off enough to create the problems I saw.

There were multiple clips from Superman, followed by others, including the Vin Diesel movie, XXX. The color between the different movie clips was WAAAAY off. Shockingly bad. And then, there was a harsh grainy look to most movie clips except the digital images and HD commercial footage shot by Samsung (showing a guy in a room watching Bluray on his TV). That looked very good. The movie clips in between, though, were just gawd-awful.

The worst offender by far were the XXX movie clips. Some of them were a very deep orange (almost like a translucent Firefox logo!), and extremely grainy (like film out of exposure). This wasn't an effect done on purpose. It was outright shoddy film transfer to the Bluray disk.

I walked away from watching the demo, shaking my head and hoping that they don't rush all of the film transfers, and that HDDVD looks better. I could care less which format wins. I just want one to pull ahead of the pack, and drop in price so I can afford it. If I have any leanings, it would be toward HDDVD, simply because I live in Korea and I read that HDDVD won't be region-coded. Then I can buy my disks from the USA and ship them here. Past that, I really don't care what wins.

I quickly realized that true-life movies (non animation) have a sort of ceiling as to how good they're going to look in HD. I'm sure this holds true for both HDDVD and Bluray. Movies like Star Wars, shot using HD equipment, would likely look incredible. The clip of "The Dukes of Hazzard", which was also on the Samsung Bluray demo disk, was not very impressive. Actually, I am happy that I saw the demo, because now I feel much more relaxed about waiting until prices come down. No hurry here.

I have read about complaints of grainy footage from Bluray owners online. I never expected it to be THAT bad. Especially through HDMI, which is how they fed it.

Has anyone else seen this same demo?
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corroonb



Joined: 04 Aug 2006

PostPosted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 9:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

A lot of the HD conversions are probably made directly from the DVDs which is mabye why you were not impressed. I think when DVD first came out a lot of discs were mastered from VHS sources rather than film stock. I believe that 35mm film is technically of a higher resolution than HD video so this sounds like laziness or incompetence.

Check out this wiki article for more info on this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_video
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