New 4K blu ray players

[ronand]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

The 450 uses a MediaTek chipset IIRC and not the bespoke Pannysonic chip that’s in the 420/820/9000 series so it’s not the same comparison. The DVD playback should be betterer by default.

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.

[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.

I haven't on the Panny 820, will give it a try. But I've never had the need to do that with DVD playback on a Sony machine. Ever. And I had that same model many moons ago. If you're having to do that with both machines into your current TV then that points to there being an issue with the display rather than the player?

[ronand]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

I haven't on the Panny 820, will give it a try. But I've never had the need to do that with DVD playback on a Sony machine. Ever. And I had that same model many moons ago. If you're having to do that with both machines into your current TV then that points to there being an issue with the display rather than the player?

I'm not going to drag my old sony tv from the shed to test that theory! But the deinterlacing is noticeably better when the source is set to video (actually the picture is quite good). There doesn't seem to be any documentation on this "progressive" feature anywhere or how a "film" dvd differs from a "video" dvd.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by ronand

I'm not going to drag my old sony tv from the shed to test that theory! But the deinterlacing is noticeably better when the source is set to video (actually the picture is quite good). There doesn't seem to be any documentation on this "progressive" feature anywhere or how a "film" dvd differs from a "video" dvd.

What that setting is for is whether an interlaced source was encoded as video or film. So far, so opaque, but what it refers to is how the image is composed. Stuff shot on interlaced video is comprised of individual fields that make up the frames, two fields per frame, with each field being a unique capture of the moving image. But film (or video shot progressive) isn't the same, as although it's still being stored as an interlaced signal on DVD it's taking each complete frame and storing it split into two fields, plus the duplicated fields to make up the 60Hz signal as per 3:2 pulldown. What any competent deinterlacer needs to know is whether the resultant image needs to have complete frames reconstituted as per 'film' or shown as fields as per video.

Additionally, that's why setting it to 'video' seems counterintuitive to me to make the image betterer when watching a film source, though you're not saying what content you're watching on DVD. You mention 576i, but ironically enough PAL content seems to avoid this deinterlacing horror show on my Panny! Maybe setting it to 'video' will help with the jaggedy-ass Hockey clip on Spears & Munsil, true enough, but for film-based content it should be making it worse, not betterer!

What a mess

[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.

[Jonathan McLeod]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

So for PAL DVD content the Panny 820 is fine, more than watchable on a day to day basis.

I finally have an answer as to why I've never been bothered by the supposedly horrendous DVD playback on the 820. I don't play many, but when I have they've always been PAL. They all seemed to look about as good as you'd expect for a DVD.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by Jonathan McLeod

I finally have an answer as to why I've never been bothered by the supposedly horrendous DVD playback on the 820. I don't play many, but when I have they've always been PAL. They all seemed to look about as good as you'd expect for a DVD.

Yeah, I mean I've mentioned it before https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...l#post19753253 but I don't expect everyone to have read everything ever.

But my DVDs are predominantly NTSC which is why it niggles me so much. And it's not just this current generation of Panny players that are doing it, I noticed it going right back to the OG UB900 4K player.