Question re: PQ & Color on a LG HD TV w/Samsung Blu player

[AnamorphicWidescreen]

Hey guys - I hate starting new threads, but this question is very specific, and I thought those with more knowledge than I have could provide some feedback here. Note this may be an obvious question to most on here; I also apologize in advance if this is too rambling....

I am a relatively newbie to Blu: A little over a year ago, I bought a new large LG HD LED Widescreen TV, along with my first Blu-ray player, a Samsung. Overall, I am extremely satisfied with these purchases. When I watch films on Blu the PQ is, overall, stunning & obviously better than anything I've seen before. What's especially impressive is when I watch an older movie (that I've seen in several older incarnations, i.e. DVD/VHS/ network TV) on Blu, the difference is especially profound - examples are: Deer Hunter; Angel Heart; Godfather I-III; The Conversation, Halloween 35th anniversary, etc. - all of these look truly beautiful on Blu. And, not only is the PQ better, but the colors are typically much more vivid than regular DVD - very impressive.

Here's the issue: When I watch regular DVD's on the same set, the PQ is obviously not quite as good but still good - however, what I really notice is that the colors on most regular DVD's are just not that vivid and actually appear somewhat washed-out at times (though I can still obviously distinguish the colors). Note that this is probably because I'm so used to Blu these days that anything less is immediately noticeable (note that when I watched regular DVD's on my older sets they probably looked the same way). I know the colors on the Blu format are supposed to be better than regular DVD. However, I just wanted others' opinion as to whether this was normal, or if this was an issue with the settings on my set...

To throw something else into the mix here, when I recently re-watched the regular DVD of Amelie (2001), the colors were quite vivid - and this wasn't even a Blu (Note that I'm very aware that this could also have a lot to do with how the movie itself was filmed...when I saw Amelie in the theatre, I do remember the bright colors....). Another regular DVD example is the 2-volume DVD set of the 2002-2003 Clone Wars Star Wars cartoons - on this set, the colors looks stunning on these. Obviously, color is an important part of cartoons so this may not be the best example...

Note I'm not that interested in fiddling with the controls/remote to achieve a certain PQ or color - the reason for this is that, as stated above, when I typically watch anything on Blu it looks fantastic, and I don't want that to change. I am slowly shifting over to Blu anyway, though am definitely keeping many of my regular DVD's....

Thanks in advance for any feedback on this...

[honeylatte]

It depends on the source material... BD has the chance to retain more color than DVD since it will be encoded at a much higher bitrate (i.e. say 7k for a DVD9 and 38k for a BD50). But if they master the BD/DVD like crap, that will show.

Not sure what you were asking really... Everything can look different, even the same film from different distributors depending on what they did to the video before it was pressed to disc. There isn't much you can do other than fiddle with the settings on your TV.

[Badas]

Both DVD and Blu-ray are set to a Rec709 colourspace.

Your display and players should be calibrated to this.

Get a test disc that has a Rec709 colour pattern and use to calibrate.

[AnamorphicWidescreen]

OK - Thanks for the responses, everyone.