I don't get it, BD-P1000

[BTBuck1]

for weeks now i've read review after review about Blu-Ray and how poor the discs look, how bad the player is yadah yadah yadah.

Well today I sat down with another member of this forum (provenflipper) and we decided to do a shootout of Blu-Ray.

He is currently on loan of a BD-P1000 and he owns about 95% of the blu-ray titles available so we had a wide spectrum of titles to play around with.

The titles we looked at where from the Worst rated BR titles to the Best.

House of flying daggers
xXx
Saw
Stealth
lord of war

We started off with xXx, this film has received some poor marks from some critics, and shining reviews from others. Now when we first put it in we put it on the scene where Vin parachutes out of a corvette thats flying off a bridge. We started the scene when the cars is stolen and watched until they are flipping the cops off as they speed away.

Watching the scene I noticed some film grain. But overall was somewhat happy with the image. This scene is difficult to judge because there are camera angles designed to "look" like it was shot from a handy-cam. So ofcourse those scenes look standard def, it's by design. However when the production cameras shoot the guys shooting the movie, it's on par with most HD i've seen. ProvenFlipper and I both looked at eachother and gave the Nod that we thought it looked great.

I wouldn't be convinced however until we got the standard DVD in there and compared. So we tested the same scene over again, the DVD was in an xbox360 and the BR in the BD-P1000 well, this was a cut and dry easy decision, the DVD looked Horrendous in comparison. The BR short of amazing in contrast.
We both agree'd it wasn't a fair comparo since the DVD wasn't pushed to it's max ability (via upconvert) so we tossed the DVD into the sammy and gave it a run.

This is where things got interesting. I've read several times that the sammy Br player is a terrible upconvert player. Well we put xXx DVD in it and WOW what a differance. Night & day almost. But guess what...still not comparing to the BR. On a scale of 1-10 then i'd give the dvd over component at 480p a 4, the upconverted DVD a 6 and the BR an 8.5
Blu-ray showed to make a conciderable differance in PQ. Quickly viewing a scene where Vin Deisels neck has the xXx tatoo was lightyears ahead in detail, color, contrast etc.


Next up we wanted to look at the "best" that Blu-Ray had to offer. We popped in STEALTH. This disc was definately the BEST no Joke HD content i've seen to date. I've spent some time with a few HDDVD titles, and none looked as good as this. HOWEVER, the titles I viewed from HDDVD where Apollo 13 (known 540p issue), Phantom of the Opera & Last samurai. and I don't know how they rank among other HDDVD's in the PQ department. Aside from the movie "Tremors" which was also awesome, that I saw on Universal HD. This was the Best HD PQ movie-wise i'd seen period. get it? got it? good!

Moving right along,

We wanted to test a "lions-gate" offering. There are known "stutter" issues on LG films on BR during DTS playback, and so I requested that DTS track be opted for. We put in "SAW"

I had recently seen SAW on HBOHD so i figured i could give a credible comparison. Recalling what I had seen on HBOHD It was ported to HD pretty well on the Broadcast. I felt watching it On BluRay that it was about on par with what I had seen, if not slightly better. Seemed some edge enhancement was taking place, that or the sharpness is just that good on Blu-Ray. Colors popped off the screen and contrast between blackest black and whitest white were up to my standard (which IMO is high) I did notice the slight studder. but it happens so fast and so infrequent you could miss it if you blinked, and it didn't take away from the film IMO. I am also guessing it's a Hardware issue since it does not happen on DolbyDigital ex mode. on a scale of 1-10 i'd give saw the same rating I gave tripple X about a 8-8.5 i'd take a half a point away for the studder and aside from that nothing else. BTW the DTS track was VERY good and close in Quality to the Lossless PCM i heard on xXx.

I wanted to see the Worst Blu-Ray had to offer. So we put in House of flying daggers. Some of you may recall my mentioning that I had a dubbed JDM version of HOFD with DTS audio track. That experience in PQ was very very bad. The recorded version I had suffered terribly from Grain, oversaturated whites and what appeared to be a poor master as well. It was so bad though that trying to distinguish what the cause was wasn't even worth it, so I just tryed to watch the movie and see what the hype was about. Well the bootleg DVD "soundwise" kept me in the movie the entire time. The PQ made me want to puke but the sound was great! So when it came to looking at the BR disc I already had a bad taste in my mouth as far as PQ was concerned with this title. Let me first say, this is the worst "PQ-Wise" BR has to offer. HOWEVER, I concider this a must have film if you love your audio equipment. I'll touch more on the audio in a moment. The PQ on the BR is what the DVD should have been. I had originally like i said viewed the DVD on a bootleg, it sucked. I saw it when it finally came to the U.S. on dvd, and the PQ was better than my bootleg, but not much (just didn't have the macroblocking) still oversaturated whites, grainy and blury, But it was also missing the DTS track which was sorely missed. The DTS track was the only reason to own the DVD. Watching the BR you could IMMEDIATELY notice the differance. yes, it wasn't fabulous, hell it wasn't even good...just ok...but it was consistantly mediocre which makes me feal that it was a poor master (original filmstock) used. This movie has the look & feal of a Kung Foo movie from the 1970's and It makes me wonder if the stock chosen was to make it fit in with the genre. I've now seen how wonderful BR can look, so I can't blame the format or the compression method for this film. All i can do is view it for what it is. An excellent adventure with probably the best damn sound effects i've heard short of the first time I saw Jurrassic park or LADDER49 in the theatre. This movie looks appreciably better than the DVD and night & day better than my bootleg. But the real win here was that as good as the DTS track was on jdmDVD, the PCM lossless track blew it outta the MF'n water. I'd give this movie a 4 or 5 in PQ, the colors are good and some scenes look ok, but it has a look that I can't figure out. Artifacts or filmgrain? (you decide) it keeps me from giving such an otherwise masterpeice a reccomend if based soley on PQ. If you go into this however with the prior experience I have had with the film, you will fall in love all over again. I looked past the lack of stun factor visually and let my other sensory take over. This movies soundtrack is breathtaking and worth a purchase on sound alone! SOUND QUALITY IS A PERFECT 10!!!!!!

So, to recap my experience with the BD-P1000, i'd have to say that after some time playing around with it I'd have to give this player a firm Reccomend for the early adopter crowd. I don't see the faults others do with this player. I've seen some movies that others bashed that I thought where appreciably better than their DVD counterparts. They are on par with what i've seen from Cable HD over HDMI minus bandwidth motion aritfacting-blocking which is what i expected from Blu-Ray. I didn't expect BR to look better than Cable-HD (aside from cable/sat HD caveats) but guess what, it did. And it did this with a player that has a known issue with a softening effect in it's video proccessing unit. This begs the question from me...You mean to tell me it gets better than this? SIGN ME UP!!!!

So I can only conclude four things, 1) HDDVD has something I have yet to see. 2) people need glasses, or their tv's calibrated. 3) There are some people out there that just want to Rain on the BR parade (HDDVD Owners) or 4) Maybe I just have the love goggles on. but I saw what I saw, and I will continue to collect BR movies in anticipation of oct 25th BDP-S1 day!



Thanks for reading and please don't flame me, this is just my opinion.
Brian

[BTBuck1]

PS,

I only a few moments with Lord Of War. Will comment on that later. I was late for a Lunch and didn't have time to thouroughly evaluate it.

Thanks,
Brian

[zombie]

Interesting read. I hope that provenflipper will share his point of view on the indepth analysis the two of you did as well.

[theknub]

nice to hear first hand reviews.

looking forward to hearing more.

[phloyd]

Yes all very interesting.

I am still waiting for something other than the Samsung but I am looking forward to checking a lot of this stuff out when the time comes...

[ProvenFlipper]

Hello everyone...

I'm finally here to add in my .02 to the discussion...

So far I have watched the following movies on BD, all of them played on the Samsung BD-P1000, hooked up to a Samsung LNS3251d LCD using the supplied HDMI cable. Audio is ran through an Onkyo HT-R530, using 3 pairs of Monster THX 600 audio cables to connect to the Multi-Ch input.

Watched Start to Finish:
Ultraviolet
50 First Dates
The Benchwarmers
Crash

Watched Pieces of:
Stealth
XXX
Saw
Lord of War
House of Flying Daggers

Have Yet to Watch:
Terminator 1 & 2
The Punisher
Hitch
Underworld: Evolution
Basic Instinct 2

So far my experience with BD has been great. Aside from a few quirks with the player, which I was aware of when I took it home the viewing and listening pleasure has been great.

I really haven't read any reviews on any of the BD, so I would consider my opinions to be relatively unbiased. As a whole the only movie that didn't blow me away visually was HOFD. Now there are many unanswered questions as to why the movie looks the way that it does, but the point is, HOFD is leagues above it DVD counterpart.

The first movie I watched all the way through was Ultraviolet. This movie has a stylized blur/ futuristic look to it, but even still you could tell that the picture was indeed clear. The audio was great and I really like how natural the bass and sound effects sound over Uncompressed PCM.

Satisfied, but still not sure if the BD experience was worth it, 50 First Dates was the next choice. Right from the start I was blown away by this movie. The sweeping views of the water and the lush landscapes were beauties to be seen in HD. The movie highlighted lots of detail and left very little to be desired. Audio really wasn't a factor in this type of movie, but as in all of the BD I've watched or previewed so far, the seperation between the channels seems to be alot better than DVD or HD cable for that matter.

I watched Benchwarmers as well, and recieved nearly the same results as 50 First Dates. Really clean picture with lots of detail, especially in the backgrounds. At first, I wasn't too sure about people's faces in The Benchwarmers, I thought I was seeing a bit of a haze, on/around them, but I realized most of it was peach fuzz on their faces. An indicator of how clear and detailed the picture is.

Next on deck was Crash. For the record, I've seen the DVD at least 5 times due to this being my girlfriends favorite movie of all time, and the BD is nowhere near the quality of DVD, upconverted or not. Again, the picture quality was amazing. One thing that I did notice however, is that when the camera was outside of the vehicle and Ludacris was driving, the picture wasn't nearly as clear, and there was some 'noise' in the dark areas, which I'm pretty sure was film grain. Other than that Crash showcased lots of detail such as, stray hairs from Luda's braids, or a clear 5"x7" photo of "The Governator" on the wall of the police station.

From what I've seen of my other movies, Stealth is definately the best so far, and I look forward to watching it in its entirety within the next couple of days. I hear Underworld: Evo is great as well, but I want to view the first movie as to garner full enjoyment of the sequel. With the exception of HOFD, all of the movies I have tried out have lived up to my expectations, most of them exceeding.

The Samsung player seems to be solid but IMO doesn't deserve to be the same price as the Sony unit. I will be taking the unit back in the next month and a half and will forego the month after that with out a player in anticipation of the BDP-S1. I will then most likely take a small vacation from work and rewatch most of the content and look for differences and similarties in the BD experience between the two players. Overall, my BD experience has been very positive and I would recommend anyone who is eager as I was to see BD in action to take a look at the Samsung player.

When I get a chance to pick up a set of component cables, I will watch some of the content over again to see if I can notice any differences in the picture, but I highly doubt that I will be able to.

[gblaue]

Originally Posted by ProvenFlipper

When I get a chance to pick up a set of component cables, I will watch some of the content over again to see if I can notice any differences in the picture, but I highly doubt that I will be able to.

DVDs you definitely will see the difference compared to a good dvd player. They look like crap at 480P via component.

[BTBuck1]

^ Im confused on this last part of proven flipper & Gblue.

I am guessing what provenflipper is saying is that he want's to try the samsung bd-p1000 over component video to validate/dismiss the argument that PQ looks better over component on the BD-P1000?

[ProvenFlipper]

Originally Posted by Brian@BBY

^ Im confused on this last part of proven flipper & Gblue.

I am guessing what provenflipper is saying is that he want's to try the samsung bd-p1000 over component video to validate/dismiss the argument that PQ looks better over component on the BD-P1000?

Brian is correct... I guess my typing wasn't as coherent as my thinking at 3 in the morning... I want to test for myself the difference between HDMI and Component on the Samsung player.

[gblaue]

Originally Posted by Brian@BBY

^ Im confused on this last part of proven flipper & Gblue.

I am guessing what provenflipper is saying is that he want's to try the samsung bd-p1000 over component video to validate/dismiss the argument that PQ looks better over component on the BD-P1000?

The 1080i output is very good ove component, but my point is don't expect the 480p output of a DVD to "WOW" you. It won't.

[Psiweaver]

Very glad to hear a first hand review from you guys. I'll be posting one up once we recieve our Pioneer Blu-Ray player in store and have it hooked up to the PRO-FD1

[Innerloop]

Here's my quick reviews of disc I own. All viewed 1080i on Samsung Plasma TV.

Picture quality only - not movie quality!

God of War: 8/10
Stealth: 9/10
House of Flying Daggers: 2/10
Fifth Element: 3/10
Terminator 2: 7/10
Basic Instinct 2 (rented!): 7/10
Underworld Evolution: 9/10
Ultraviolet: 8/10
Crash: 7/10

[BTBuck1]

^ Thanks for your review. I guess my HOFD review was only slightly higher because i came off such a bad DVD experience and I was stunned by the audio.

[Psiweaver]

His review was also only PQ I bet the audio for HOFD was stunning and I think that the picture quality has more to do with the master of the film rather than the actual disc itself.

[JTK]

Originally Posted by Innerloop

House of Flying Daggers: 2/10
Fifth Element: 3/10

Two movies that should have easily been demo show off pieces... That's sad.

[Psiweaver]

Yeah I think HOFD isn't the discs fault but more the film stock no excuses though for Fifth Element as that should look and sound stunning like the superbit version does.

[JTK]

Originally Posted by Psiweaver

Yeah I think HOFD isn't the discs fault but more the film stock no excuses though for Fifth Element as that should look and sound stunning like the superbit version does.

That's what I mean by compromising, by the way.

Now you're getting it! You're right! There's NO excuse whatsoever. Exactly right. That's what I'm talking about!

[Psiweaver]

When I talk about comprimising I'm talking about the whole experience from loading a disc to playing it to watching it and hearing it.

[JTK]

Originally Posted by Psiweaver

When I talk about comprimising I'm talking about the whole experience from loading a disc to playing it to watching it and hearing it.

I can tolerate a minor delay on the front end if the end result is perfection, especially at half the cost of entry.

That's where the "compromise" can be negated.

[Psiweaver]

For me I cannot unfortunenately. I want a great user experience from beggining to end and that hasn't been delivered yet and i'm eagerly anticipating someone that can deliver that.