New 4K blu ray players

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by ronand

DVD playback is not great by default in the 450 either and I shouldn't have to change a setting every time I play a disc. Have you tried this setting on the 820? I had to change a similar setting on my 12 year old sony bdp-s370 to get acceptable results although its still worse than my panny.

This post should really be in the Panny thread but I'll keep it here and the mods can maybe shift the whole discussion over to there, but I tried using the Video deinterlacing on the 820 when playing the terribly jaggy test patterns/clips on the S&M DVD...and it had zero effect. Literally none. They're all still jaggy as hell. As bad as the Hockey clip is, the Ship one is even worse.

I did though try the Montage, first watching with the deinterlacer set to Auto and then to Video. With it on Auto then not only did it have the extra jaggies but it also showed combing on several of the edit points. With it on Video then the combing was eliminated, but now it's causing shimmering and moiré on finer details because it's applying a Video deinterlacer to Film content. The Euro 820 is just so very, very bad at playing 480i any way you slice it.

I say that because, as I mentioned previous, PAL/576i content doesn't seem to be affected anywhere near as badly. Using the R2 DVD of My Fair Lady, at first I was horrified because it was unbelievably jaggy, but then I realised I'd left the deinterlacer on Video and switching it back to Auto made it look 10x betterer, because it was applying the correct deinterlacing and not forcing video cadence onto film. I then compared the same DVD playing on the OPPO 203 and aside from some additional but very mild jaggies on diagonals on the Panny the two were very similar indeed, with the Panny looking superficially 'sharper' because of the extra special sauce they're ladling on.

So for PAL DVD content the Panny 820 is fine, more than watchable on a day to day basis. But for NTSC? Shoot it man! Shoot it in the head! One thing I will say is that film-based NTSC content doesn't look as mega-jaggy as that video-based torture test NTSC content does. I mean, it's still way worse than the OPPO when you compare them (those piano strings in the Montage, yikes!) but I can understand why people might not think it terrible in isolation just because DVD itself is thought of as terrible, that things like jaggies are par for the course. They're unavoidable when dealing with such low-rez content, true, but there comes a point when I have to aks if it's the content doing it or the player doing it, and as always I don't want any extra processing slathered on if I can help it, even when playing DVD. And I wonder if the extra sharpening applied by default in the Panny is also what's making people think it's "better" for DVD than whatever other playback deck they have to hand.