Pioneer Elite BDP-LX500

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by BijouMan

Did you not read my HDR10+ post? Again, although Dolby Vision is significantly more popular, some filmmakers don't want to pay Dolby's licensing fees, so they will encode their discs in HDR10+ to achieve a higher level of picture quality than the basic HDR10. If you’re like me and you want to get the most out of every single disc you may come across, you will want equipment that supports both competing formats. I’m not the type who upgrades their equipment seemingly every year, so I didn’t want to upgrade my TV to 4K until they came out with an HDR10+/Dolby Vision dual-format OLED for the U.S. market. VIZIO was nice enough to release such an offering, so I bought it almost immediately after it came out. I also will definitely not upgrade my projector to 4K until they release an HDR10+/Dolby Vision dual-format laser projector (see this thread).

Since when do filmmakers pay the licensing fees themselves? And HDR10+ still requires license fees, otherwise everyone would be using it...

[BijouMan]

Interestingly, the back of the UDP-LX500 still has the same copper screws as their midrange to high-end LaserDisc models from the late 80’s and 90’s.

[BijouMan]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Since when do filmmakers pay the licensing fees themselves? And HDR10+ still requires license fees, otherwise everyone would be using it...

HDR10+ is an open standard, unlike Dolby Vision, which is proprietary. Also, if it’s not up to filmmakers, then why are films like Yesterday and Scoob! encoded in HDR10+? These discs come from studios that also do Dolby Vision.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by BijouMan

HDR10+ is an open standard, unlike Dolby Vision, which is proprietary. Also, if it’s not up to filmmakers, then why are films like Yesterday and Scoob! encoded in HDR10+? These discs come from studios that also do Dolby Vision.

Nope. HDR10 is an open standard, HDR10+ is a proprietary tech extension to that format and is literally owned by Samsung and Panasonic. You want to use it in tech you gotta pay 'em, I'm not making it up: https://hdr10plus.org/license-program/

Are you kidding with the filmmaker thing? The studios make these decisions, not filmmakers unless we're talking the biggest hitters like Señor Spielbergo - and even then he doesn't literally pay for it himself. There's generally a theme with the major DV-supporting studios that they use DV for new stuff and not so much for catalogue discs but it's not an automatic assumption (unless the studio is Paramount who put DV on everything) and Warners rarely use DV for animated content, none of the DC Universe UHDs have it either. Besides, Universal (who released Yesterday) have released new discs that have neither 10+ or DV e.g. Halloween 2018 so that kinda holes your misguided notion below the waterline.

[BijouMan]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Nope. HDR10 is an open standard, HDR10+ is a proprietary tech extension to that format and is literally owned by Samsung and Panasonic. You want to use it in tech you gotta pay 'em, I'm not making it up: https://hdr10plus.org/license-program/

Are you kidding with the filmmaker thing? The studios make these decisions, not filmmakers unless we're talking the biggest hitters like Señor Spielbergo - and even then he doesn't literally pay for it himself. There's generally a theme with the major DV-supporting studios that they use DV for new stuff and not so much for catalogue discs but it's not an automatic assumption (unless the studio is Paramount who put DV on everything) and Warners rarely use DV for animated content, none of the DC Universe UHDs have it either. Besides, Universal (who released Yesterday) have released new discs that have neither 10+ or DV e.g. Halloween 2018 so that kinda holes your misguided notion below the waterline.

Yesterday came out in 2019, two years after Universal started doing Dolby Vision (they were actually the first to start doing it, and the first Dolby Vision discs were Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2.) Also, unlike HDR10+, which only charges a small annual fee to manufacturers, Dolby charges royalties to manufacturers and they also charge content creators to use their equipment, unless it's consumer equipment (i.e. the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro.)

[Vilya]

There are not many 4K discs that feature HDR10+; you can visit the short list of them here in this thread:

https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=300877

The first post is kept up to date.

When I saw that this thread was active again I was hoping that it was with news of this player being available again.

[WKoA13]

Originally Posted by BijouMan

Yesterday came out in 2019, two years after Universal started doing Dolby Vision (they were actually the first to start doing it, and the first Dolby Vision discs were Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2.) Also, unlike HDR10+, which only charges a small annual fee to manufacturers, Dolby charges royalties to manufacturers and they also charge content creators to use their equipment, unless it's consumer equipment (i.e. the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro.)

YESTERDAY coming out in 2019 really has nothing to do with whether or not Universal has released discs without DV or HDR10+.

And a small annual fee? So....you admit it does cost money to implement?

[Geoff D]

So how comes Universal's Hitchcock UHD set released a few weeks ago has neither 10+ or DV? Did someone conduct a seance where they aksed Hitch if he preferred one or the other and he said "I'm not paying for either!"? I suppose Kubrick told them from beyond the grave to use DV rather than 10+ for the Spartacus UHD

Universal are not putting 10+ on everything just like they don't put Dobly on everything, it's not a case of an ideological battle of one vs the other but about what encoding workflows are worth their time and effort, as even 10+ will cost more to do than straight HDR10 because it requires more person hours to run the 10+ analysis pass and QC the resultant metadata. The authoring houses don't have an infinite amount of free time, they have to arrange this stuff ahead of time and decisions are made to prioritise one over the other, not because of brand loyalty but simple logistics. And why aren't all the indies - who have more reason to watch the pennies than the major studios - using 10+ instead of/with DV if it's so free and open? Second Sight chose 10+ over DV for Dawn of the Dead because of the cost involved, I know that for a fact, but Shout and Kino and Vinegar Syndrome and Blue Underground and Capelight and Turbine and L'atelier d'images all seem to be getting on just fine with paying the yearly tithe to Dobly.

TBH Yesterday was a very small British film, albeit released by a major distributor, so in that sense money may be why it never got a Dobly pass to begin with (it's not DV even on streaming AFAIK) but you're placing far too much emphasis on the brand battle as to why it got 10+ for disc, I highly doubt the producers were even aware of it. As it was a new release, which Universal usually put both DV and 10+ on, Universal didn't want to let it out there with vanilla HDR10 so they did a quick 10+ pass.

PS

Some versions of DaVinci Resolve actually come with Dolby Vision installed for free, it's just the automated first pass of downconversion metadata (just like HDR10+ ) and not the manual trim version, but the notion of Dobly as the evil corporation raking in monies and 10+ as the little HDR format that could is some way off the mark.

[BijouMan]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

So how comes Universal's Hitchcock UHD set released a few weeks ago has neither 10+ or DV? Did someone conduct a seance where they aksed Hitch if he preferred one or the other and he said "I'm not paying for either!"? I suppose Kubrick told them from beyond the grave to use DV rather than 10+ for the Spartacus UHD

Universal are not putting 10+ on everything just like they don't put Dobly on everything, it's not a case of an ideological battle of one vs the other but about what encoding workflows are worth their time and effort, as even 10+ will cost more to do than straight HDR10 because it requires more person hours to run the 10+ analysis pass and QC the resultant metadata. The authoring houses don't have an infinite amount of free time, they have to arrange this stuff ahead of time and decisions are made to prioritise one over the other, not because of brand loyalty but simple logistics. And why aren't all the indies - who have more reason to watch the pennies than the major studios - using 10+ instead of/with DV if it's so free and open?

TBH Yesterday was a very small British film, albeit released by a major distributor, so in that sense money may be why it never got a Dobly pass to begin with (it's not DV even on streaming AFAIK) but you're placing far too much emphasis on the brand battle as to why it got 10+, I highly doubt the producers were even aware of it. As it was a new release, which Universal usually put both DV and 10+ on, Universal didn't want to let it out there with vanilla HDR10 so they did a quick 10+ pass.

PS

Some versions of DaVinci Resolve actually come with Dolby Vision installed for free, it's just the automated first pass of downconversion metadata (just like HDR10+ ) and not the manual trim version, but the notion of Dobly as the evil corporation raking in monies and 10+ as the little HDR format that could is some way off the mark.

Well, if the producer of a film is no longer alive, someone else has to decide whether to put in the time and money to encode their discs in these formats. The makers of the Hitchcock discs must not have thought his films could benefit from HDR10+ or Dolby Vision, so they didn't think it was worth the time or money to encode the discs in either of those formats. Also, I want to be able to watch a film in its full quality no matter what its HDR situation is, so that's why I always wait for dual-format equipment.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by BijouMan

Well, if the producer of a film is no longer alive, someone else has to decide whether to put in the time and money to encode their discs in these formats. The makers of the Hitchcock discs must not have thought his films could benefit from HDR10+ or Dolby Vision, so they didn't think it was worth the time or money to encode the discs in either of those formats. Also, I want to be able to watch a film in its full quality no matter what its HDR situation is, so that's why I always wait for dual-format equipment.

The thing with HDR is that tone mapping is not needed or is applied minimally if the display can meet or get closer to the specifications of the underlying content. As I've got a TV that can show content mastered up to ~1200 nits in "1:1" fashion then most 10+ discs wouldn't even show a difference (most DV ones don't for that matter) because they're from Fox or Universal who master to hit 1000 nits peak anyway, and of the 10+ discs that go above 1200 nits they also come with DV which my TV has, so my bases are covered.

I get that the FOMO is strong with this one but you'll have to take my word for it that the better the TV is - for both picture quality and tone mapping - then the less difference you'll see between HDR10 and the optional formats. The ironical thing about, say, the high-end Panasonic OLEDs having 10+ and DV is that their mapping is so good already the other formats are there to just tick a box for marketing more than anything.

PS

Scoob! is in Dolby Vision on streaming, just like virtually every other Warners title that's only 10 or 10+ on UHD disc, so they already done paid whatever fees you think they pay to use Dolby's "grading equipment", they didn't have the time or inclination to encode it as such to disc which is a more complicated process than the streaming encode. Again: it's not so much ideology but pragmatism that's deciding these things.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by BijouMan

Yes, but there is still a difference (albeit a small one) because the premium formats have better color correction. Also, I'm told that Dolby Vision grading for streaming is different than it is for Ultra HD Blu-ray. If a disc is encoded in HDR10+, I still don't want to be stuck with the basic HDR10.

No, if a display could do 4000 nits and 100% of P3 then that could mean that about 90% of UHD discs would need no tone mapping at all, and only minimal mapping for the rest. The premium formats don't use grading tools at source that are ANY different to that used for HDR10, you grade in the PQ ST.2084 transfer function in whatever grading suite you choose and then the metadata and resultant trim passes are generated after that using proprietary tools.

Dolby Vision at source creates only one master file (unless it's specifically revisited by the filmmakers if they weren't happy with it) which is the same grading sent to the streamers and disc creators alike. What happens with the ENCODING is very different, DV streams are usually a single 10-bit transport stream with the relevant metadata embedded into the signal but DV on disc has a 'dual layer' encoding system designed to provide backwards compatibility with HDR10 as per the UHD disc spec (whereby if you use an optional HDR format you must provide the base format as well).

This is a process where the DV master is analysed and an HDR10 grade is created from that analysis pass. Then the HDR10 is compared against the actual DV master and any residual imagery is compressed into into a separate 'full enhancement layer' which also carries the dynamic metadata. This 'FEL' is encoded to disc alongside the HDR10 layer, needing careful QC every step of the way. These two layers are then combined upon playback to create the full 12-bit DV output whereas streaming just uprezzes it into 12-bit. But some UHD discs use what's called a 'minimum enhancement layer' or 'MEL' because they don't carry any extra visual information over and above the HDR10 layer, it's just a carrier for the dynamic metadata and is essentially Dolby's version of 10+, albeit with a 12-bit uprez inside their processing engine.

[edit] Either way, encoding DV to disc is more involved than encoding DV for streaming which is why support for DV on disc can still be quite sporadic, studios have to weigh up the benefits against the costs involved, not 'licensing' as such but the logistics and person hours involved which is why smaller new titles and some catalogue discs still won't have DV, even from the majors that use DV for most new releases.

[BijouMan]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

No, if a display could do 4000 nits and 100% of P3 then that could mean that about 90% of UHD discs would need no tone mapping at all, and only minimal mapping for the rest. The premium formats don't use grading tools at source that are ANY different to that used for HDR10, you grade in the PQ ST.2084 transfer function in whatever grading suite you choose and then the metadata and resultant trim passes are generated after that using proprietary tools.

Dolby Vision at source creates only one master file (unless it's specifically revisited by the filmmakers if they weren't happy with it) which is the same grading sent to the streamers and disc creators alike. What happens with the ENCODING is very different, DV streams are usually a single 10-bit transport stream with the relevant metadata embedded into the signal but DV on disc has a 'dual layer' encoding system designed to provide backwards compatibility with HDR10 as per the UHD disc spec (whereby if you use an optional HDR format you must provide the base format as well).

This is a process where the DV master is analysed and an HDR10 grade is created from that analysis pass. Then the HDR10 is compared against the actual DV master and any residual imagery is compressed into into a separate 'full enhancement layer' which also carries the dynamic metadata. This 'FEL' is encoded to disc alongside the HDR10 layer, needing careful QC every step of the way. These two layers are then combined upon playback to create the full 12-bit DV output whereas streaming just uprezzes it into 12-bit. But some UHD discs use what's called a 'minimum enhancement layer' or 'MEL' because they don't carry any extra visual information over and above the HDR10 layer, it's just a carrier for the dynamic metadata and is essentially Dolby's version of 10+, albeit with a 12-bit uprez inside their processing engine.

[edit] Either way, encoding DV to disc is more involved than encoding DV for streaming which is why support for DV on disc can still be quite sporadic, studios have to weigh up the benefits against the costs involved, not 'licensing' as such but the logistics and person hours involved which is why smaller new titles and some catalogue discs still won't have DV, even from the majors that use DV for most new releases.

Tha_VillaMan did a good video comparing HDR10, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. He used the other "P" company's midrange player and the 3000nit VIZIO P-Series Quantum X. I suggest watching his video which I will link here.

https://youtu.be/S3FJHIY0ag8

HDTVTest also did a good video with two calibrated "P" OLEDs and two OPPO UDP-203s:

https://youtu.be/3-bmH6HN0mY

The only display I'm aware of that gets up to 4000nits is Japanese company "S's" flagship LED LCD. No matter how good a display’s HDR “upscaling” is, it is not guaranteed to be as good as a native HDR10+ or Dolby Vision signal.
DISCLAIMER: These videos do not belong to me. All credit goes to Tha_VillaMan and HDTVTest.

[Geoff D]

I love the way that the dude completely ignores how the sun is blatantly clipping more in the 10+ version of that first KOTM comparison while coming to the conclusion that it has "greater dynamic range" than the Dolby version, and to think people wonder why I don't pay any attention to YT videos. Still, at least he acknowledges that the TV's processing may also be playing a part in this and he even comes to the conclusion that if you have one or the other then you shouldn't be stressing over it "in the real world". Wise words indeed.

And here's the thing: With KOTM all three versions are based around an HDR10 layer which just has the dynamic metadata on top, so it's the same base layer being interpreted via the TV's own mapping of HDR10, the dynamic 10+ and the dynamic DV.

[BijouMan]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

I love the way that the dude completely ignores how the sun is blatantly clipping more in the 10+ version of that first KOTM comparison while coming to the conclusion that it has "greater dynamic range" than the Dolby version, and to think people wonder why I don't pay any attention to YT videos. Still, at least he acknowledges that the TV's processing may also be playing a part in this and he even comes to the conclusion that if you have one or the other then you shouldn't be stressing over it. Wise words indeed.

And here's the thing: With KOTM all three versions are based around an HDR10 layer which just has the dynamic metadata on top, so it's the same base layer being interpreted via the TV's own mapping of HDR10, the dynamic 10+ and the dynamic DV.

You can only fully see the difference in real life. This video was encoded in HLG.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by BijouMan

You can only fully see the difference in real life. This video was encoded in HLG.

Dude himself said that "in the real world" the differences aren't enough to bother getting all FOMO'd about.

[Geoff D]

Evidently.

[JohnAV]

Just looking at the prices on that Pioneer AU site you mentioned as seen via market currency exchange.

UDP-LX500 is $2300 AUD is $1642 USD
UDP-LX800 is $4500 AUD is $3212 USD

Comparing USA/Canada sites there is no UHD blu-ray players showing. Same with UK not available.

Looking at 6 months ETA pretty tough.

[BijouMan]

Originally Posted by JohnAV

Just looking at the prices on that Pioneer AU site you mentioned as seen via market currency exchange.

UDP-LX500 is $2300 AUD is $1642 USD
UDP-LX800 is $4500 AUD is $3212 USD

Comparing USA/Canada sites there is no UHD blu-ray players showing. Same with UK not available.

Looking at 6 months ETA pretty tough.

But does this mean they're going to release a new model, or will they just re-release and update these with HDR10+ once the crisis ends? Signs on the Australian and European sites point to a re-release of the current model, whereas signs on the U.S. sites point to a new model being in development (since everything else is listed but "Out of Stock," and the main Pioneer site outside of their A/V division lists the current model as discontinued, although what is weird is that it lists two of their pre-UHD models, the BDP-62FD and BDP-80FD as current.)

[JohnAV]

Originally Posted by BijouMan

But does this mean they're going to release a new model, or will they just re-release and update these with HDR10+ once the crisis ends? Signs on the Australian and European sites point to a re-release of the current model, whereas signs on the U.S. sites point to a new model being in development (since everything else is listed but "Out of Stock," and the main Pioneer site outside of their A/V division lists the current model as discontinued, although what is weird is that it lists two of their pre-UHD models, the BDP-62FD and BDP-80FD as current.)

When I go on the USA site and look at the AVR's, they all show out of stock for all the elite AVR's. I see online the company had a sizable debt to work out, delisted from Tokyo stock market even. In Oct 2019 I saw Sound United unexpectedly terminate a planned acquisition. Even up to now I see nothing that is really positive in the news. Really if you are looking for their products they seem to be in a bad situation, pandemic not helping. Just looking at about dozen articles trying to piece this mess together.

Then checking Onkyo who owned them

But the entity formerly known as Onkyo USA Corporation is no more, ending a 45-year run as Onkyo's exclusive sales, marketing and distribution division for the Americas, effective July 29, 2020

I think I am calling this DOA.

[gkolb]

Originally Posted by JohnAV

When I go on the USA site and look at the AVR's, they all show out of stock for all the elite AVR's. I see online the company had a sizable debt to work out, delisted from Tokyo stock market even. In Oct 2019 I saw Sound United unexpectedly terminate a planned acquisition. Even up to now I see nothing that is really positive in the news. Really if you are looking for their products they seem to be in a bad situation, pandemic not helping. Just looking at about dozen articles trying to piece this mess together.

Then checking Onkyo who owned them


I think I am calling this DOA.

Yes, it really sounds like a death spiral.

I’ve owned some past Pioneer Elite equipment and thought it was solid.
Odds are pretty low on survival, IMHO.