Sony introduces high-end ZD9 TV series with HDR

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by JimShaw

Always fun to test and play

Sorry, I only just realised I was talking to the wrong person, I thought you were elway...who's still reluctant to give out any specifics.

Elway, what's your contrast, gamma and black level set to in Custom for HDR? Go on, divulging those won't hurt a bit.

[vincentric]

Originally Posted by DJR662

Whoa, talking about luxury! That's quite a difference from my 17,3" laptop screen.

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Holy shit, that's some monitor! It's an increasing trend for people to eschew a traditional desktop size monitor and just buy a big-ass TV, I don't have the room where my PC is but I'd do it if I could.

As for bias lighting: I've tried it, not a fan.

I like the sensibility am hearing here which am lacking at times though, fwiw, am not interested in jewelry or fancy shoes and clothes that much so have a healthy disposable income to spend on dorky tech toys.

Originally Posted by mutelight

I use Philips Hue light strips for bias lighting which I really like since I can change them to any color I want and it is tied into my macros on my Harmony Elite.

[Show spoiler]

I also have a Hue strip on the back of my desk in my office but not behind the 930E.

[Show spoiler]

I've read that ideally you want to keep your ambient lights at 6000-6500K for accuracy but hey having choices to do whatever you want is even better. Setup's looking good (like that Californication poster, good show imo).

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Yep, still the same. With contrast at 88 and black level at 50, Custom clips at 1000 nits, Pro gets out to about 1500 (what I'm using at the moment) and Home gets within touching distance of 4000. Tested on both Ryan Masciola's clipping patterns and the 0-10,000 ramp on Sony UHDs.

I don't have Ryan's clip patterns, and have not messed with Custom and Home yet but can concur that on Pro with Contrast 90 and BL50 I get 1500nits on the XE93 without any clipping. I'll have a look at Custom and Home later tonight when am free.

[elwaylite]

Keep in mind my pro is calibrated for SDR and would be mapping over from certain settings, so it may not be accurate to compare them.

When looking which mode to use for HDR, from a stock perspective, it was obvious that Custom was better than Home.

[mutelight]

Originally Posted by vincentric

I've read that ideally you want to keep your ambient lights at 6000-6500K for accuracy but hey having choices to do whatever you want is even better. Setup's looking good (like that Californication poster, good show imo).

Yeah, I have the ability to set any white color temperature but I sometimes use different colors.

Thanks!

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by elwaylite

Keep in mind my pro is calibrated for SDR and would be mapping over from certain settings, so it may not be accurate to compare them.

When looking which mode to use for HDR, from a stock perspective, it was obvious that Custom was better than Home.

Forget about the pro. I'd love to know what contrast, black level and gamma are set at on your HDR Custom mode. Don't need nuthin' else, don't want nuthin' else, just those three itty bitty numbers s'il vous plait.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by vincentric

I like the sensibility am hearing here which am lacking at times though, fwiw, am not interested in jewelry or fancy shoes and clothes that much so have a healthy disposable income to spend on dorky tech toys.

Same here dude, why do you think I have a ZD9 and an OPPO and 160-odd 4K discs to go with my other thousand-odd Blu-rays? I ain't Oprah-rich, lemme tell ya!

[pbz06]

Pro and Home are identical, just shifted over on default Contrast. But Pro at 85 measures the same as Home at about 95.

[elwaylite]

Originally Posted by geoff d

forget about the pro. I'd love to know what contrast, black level and gamma are set at on your hdr custom mode. Don't need nuthin' else, don't want nuthin' else, just those three itty bitty numbers s'il vous plait.

92
50
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[vincentric]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Same here dude, why do you think I have a ZD9 and an OPPO and 160-odd 4K discs to go with my other thousand-odd Blu-rays? I ain't Oprah-rich, lemme tell ya!

I've seen the Chapelle Netflix ep where he mentions something about having 'STFU money' whenever his wife complains (or something like that), I myself only have enough for 'please be quiet.'

[gkolb]

Hey Sony, it will be mid-December in the morning, why haven't we heard the Announcement for the DV release schedule yet?
(The Ides of December, is that a thing at all? No? Probably not...)

It's not like we're actually getting any firmware for it this month? Are we?

[elwaylite]

Finally decided to sit down and use Spears and Munsil version 1 (1080p blu-ray), to check output settings for the Oppo 203, since it has a ton. Some people use Source Direct with the Sony because the chip is very good, others use Auto everything, etc... Here is what I found on the 940E, keeping in mind HDMI 1 out on the 203 goes directly to HDMI in 3 on my 940E, so nothing can interfere with the results.

Source Direct, which was sending 1080p had some issues with darkening fine chroma resolution patterns, no matter whether it was 12 bit, 10 bit, 8 bit, and 422 or 444. So, source direct is not something I would use.

So setting Output rez to Auto, Custom Res to 1080p/Auto, I tested color space and depth.

Basically unless I used 422, I found an issue with the one fine chroma vertical patterns, where it had some vertical bands showing on the pattern, did not matter what the bit depth was. For some reason the 940E and 203 do not get along with 444 out. Granted, seeing this in real content is one thing, but if I know the pattern has issues with a setting, no reason to use it if it is perfect with another setting.

So here are the images from my testing:

Final Settings


Output while disc is in


Fine chroma pattern with bands (might be hard to see depending on your screen, but if you notice some of the red bars are darker than others, these show as bands when you use your eyes on the tv screen)


Chroma pattern without bands (422 color space)

[Geoff D]

Hah! I thought you were above this sort of thing?

I've noticed the same thing with the chroma multiburst into my Zed on both the Sony player and the OPPO, they both use MediaTek silicon so I'm not surprised that they share a similar artefact. It doesn't have any identifiable impact on real world content that I can see so I just left it on auto for colour space.

[elwaylite]

LOL, there is so much back and forth on it it, I said hell, let me check ALL of them.

And I agree, doubt the 422 vs 444 is a big deal, but Ill just leave 12 bit and 422 forced.

Was surprised at the darkening with Source Direct though, I half figured the 940 would be better at that than the Oppo.

Also glad the 203 has a work around to force HDR10 instead of DV, not happy about the black level issues, would like to see that fixed.

[Geoff D]

Yes, if you select Source Direct and play a 1080p source then it will play as 1080p, ergo the TV is doing the upscaling to 4K and so it's rolling off the horizontal chroma quite noticeably. This is not a problem with the OPPO and is nothing new on the TV side either, most brands of TV do this (and not just 4K) to the horizontal chroma for whatever reasons although some picture modes override this, e.g. Game on the Sonys will give you full chroma resolution.

But if you pipe a 4K signal to the TV then the chroma roll-off isn't as pronounced, hence that multiburst looking much better when the player upscales 1080p to 4K first. This is why I advocate letting the player do the upscaling whenever people pose this question in the player threads.

[elwaylite]

Makes perfect sense.

[DJR662]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Yes, if you select Source Direct and play a 1080p source then it will play as 1080p, ergo the TV is doing the upscaling to 4K and so it's rolling off the horizontal chroma quite noticeably. This is not a problem with the OPPO and is nothing new on the TV side either, most brands of TV do this (and not just 4K) to the horizontal chroma for whatever reasons although some picture modes override this, e.g. Game on the Sonys will give you full chroma resolution.

But if you pipe a 4K signal to the TV then the chroma roll-off isn't as pronounced, hence that multiburst looking much better when the player upscales 1080p to 4K first. This is why I advocate letting the player do the upscaling whenever people pose this question in the player threads.

Did you by any chance do a comparison between the ZD9 and the X800's upscaling capabilities? I let the X800 send the signal out in its original resolution because 480i NTSC DVDs look better that way on my ZD9. If I let the X800 do the scaling, the framerate is very jerky on those DVDs and there are small horizontal lines visible on (fast) moving objects.

[Geoff D]

Did you check what frame rate the player's upscaling was sending out? I've been through the coterie of S&M SD test patterns on the X800 and real world content looked fine to me when upscaled all the way to 4K, but it's crucial that the DVD 24p mode is activated to get the proper 24p frame rate from 480i film-based content when upscaled. (The X800's 480i upscaling is VASTLY better than that of the Panny UB900, I can tell you that much. 480i is effectively broken on the Panny.)

[DJR662]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Did you check what frame rate the player's upscaling was sending out? I've been through the coterie of S&M SD test patterns on the X800 and real world content looked fine to me when upscaled all the way to 4K, but it's crucial that the DVD 24p mode is activated to get the proper 24p frame rate from 480i film-based content when upscaled. (The X800's 480i upscaling is VASTLY better than that of the Panny UB900, I can tell you that much. 480i is effectively broken on the Panny.)

Haven't really checked the framerate but they are all US NTSC DVDs containing 70s and 80s anime TV series. Therefore I take it the 24p mode for DVDs wouldn't be of much use here? When letting the player send the OG resolution, the framerate for these DVDs is still jerky but it's watchable. But if I let the X800 do the scaling, it becomes much worse. During horizontal pans the picture skips like crazy and those small lines I mentioned earlier are very annoying.

[elwaylite]

I have also seen on Oppo's of the past, dvd 24p ON can be bad too and herky jerky.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by DJR662

Haven't really checked the framerate but they are all US NTSC DVDs containing 70s and 80s anime TV series. Therefore I take it the 24p mode for DVDs wouldn't be of much use here? When letting the player send the OG resolution, the framerate for these DVDs is still jerky but it's watchable. But if I let the X800 do the scaling, it becomes much worse. During horizontal pans the picture skips like crazy and those small lines I mentioned earlier are very annoying.

Ah, fair enough, now you're going off-piste because those kinds of sources often need very sensitive de-interlacing and whatnot. For properly encoded 24fps-as-3:2 60Hz content then the player is absolutely fine to my eyes, but the one area where the X800 tripped up when I went through the SD test patterns was the 24p (PF-Alt) with film flags turning on and off, the player can't lock on to that ever-changing cadence and the image goes a bit loopy. But this behaviour is the same even if I set the X800 to Original Resolution and output 480i to the ZD9, that PF-Alt pattern still looks ****ed.