Saw Samsung's Blu-ray player...

mutelight

I can not even begin to describe how underwhelmed I was. I actually took the time to check how they had it setup. I tried to fine tune the image settings, made sure they were using an HDMI interconnect and the player was outputting 1080p to Samsungs 1080p native LCD panel. Everything was just fine but the IQ was horrendously poor. Now don't get me wrong it looks better than any SD signal but far inferior to the Toshiba HD-DVD player. Why they are sticking with MPEG2 compression is beyond me. VC-1 is such an incredible format, great IQ with a great compression ratio.

I really couldn't believe my eyes when I was in Best Buy yesterday looking at the Samsung Blu-ray player. It was pretty poor to say the least. I found my compressed to crap and back Comcast HD to have better IQ than Blu-ray and I am in no way exaggerating. They had completely moved the HD-DVD player since Blu-ray came in and put it on the 1080p Samsung LCD. I remember commenting on how nice HD-DVD looked and how it wiped the floor with my Comcast service. I saw very little to virtually no compression artifacts with HD-DVD and bright vivid colors compared to Blu-ray where the colors seemed more muted and all of the content had a fair amount of mosquito noise in the image. I mean even in their Blu-ray demo video they had made they did one of those hokey DVD vs. Blu-ray side-by-sides and the image representation of Blu-ray looked slightly higher res but with a ton of jagged edges which looked like aliasing. I mean come on, this is your show! I know the player was capable of better looking IQ than that because the schmo on the couch looked better than the mountains with gigantic pixels. I am ranting now, I just find it rediculous that consumers are expected to pay twice the price for what I find to be half the product.

The capacity is great and it looks to be a great emerging technology. However, due to the compression methods they are using for this format you are getting significantly larger file sizes for inferior IQ and audio. (Yeah Blu-ray has a higher capacity but it is being used so incredibly inefficiently!) I can safely say that even the IQ of the 720p HD trailers you can download off of the wmvhd.com site are much better than the 1080p samples I saw in the store and the file size of the wmv files are ridiculously smaller and I also find Apple's H.264 codec to be possibly better than all of them in certain aspects. Granted, I did not watch a whole movie in Blu-ray format but these were all samples to showcase the technology. I have heard from people that Blu-ray was kinda shoddy but when I saw it for myself I really couldn't believe my eyes.

mmcgehee

Every time I've seen the player hooked up to an LCD it looks like ****, usually because Black enhancement is turned on on both devices. You can't expect much of a proper setup from a kid at BB who's making $6/HR. At my store we're running the 5th Element on the 60" SXRD, and right next to it on the same tv is the Toshiba HD-DVD drive. Both look good, but HD-DVD gives you more texture in cloth and brighter colors. The Samsung however behaves more like a DVD player should, unlike the Toshiba with it's long loading times and lack of memory buffer.

AS for audio, we're running RTi12s, CSi5, and FXi5's off of an Onkyo 903. Now both players won't send out any audio except for multichannel when run through HDMI. That means in order to get DTS, THX, or PXII modes you have to run an optical/coaxial out. Nothing too serious but quirky none the less.

Now Uncompressed PCM sounds great off a blu-ray disk and 5.1 DD off of HD-DVD sounds really good too. It's hard to compare them correctly until we have a hybrid disk.

What's going to win this "format war" is what movies you can get. With HD-DVD having hit releases all the way up until the culmination of The Lord of the Rings trilogy being released in December, versus Blu-Ray having very few hit franchise titles announced (Disney). It's wouldn't be a shocker to see more studios jumping ship to do both formats.

mutelight

Yeah I remember a little while back when I was playing around with the Toshiba it was terribly slow. As far as the IQ I would definitely say the HD-DVD is superior hands down. I am terribly interested to hear something encoded in DTS-HD.

Toxis

I wonder if Pixar will follow disney or not...

mutelight

Considering Disney owns Pixar I am sure that they would.

cheddar

Yep,
Unless there's internal politicing with John Lasseter, it's Disney that has the final say in what gets released and when. Those cars trailers look great in high-def on the computer. I would love to see how cars would look on blu-ray. Since there aren't any 'defects' in the original print since it's digital, my guess is it would look awesome...

My experience so far is that the choice of unremastered releases is killing blu-ray reviews so far. The format picks up all the garbage in the original master and they really should have either picked better material or spent more time digitally cleaning the releases.

I saw the sony blu-ray player on a sony rear projection tv yesterday at sony style. The clip from underworld evolution was very detailed with no artifacts that I could see. Can't wait to see kate in all her blu-ray glory when I take the plunge...;)

Toxis

See I heard a while back that Pixar left Disney...

mmcgehee

Nope, when they gave Steve Jobs a crap load of stock and effectively making him the single largest Disney shareholder Pixar got locked in.