Is PS3 Still The Best Blu-ray Player??

[rollon1980]

I'm sorry to ruin your day, but here's the deal:

I have set up a few home cinemas in my lifetime. Most recently one with a JVC-550 projector (wow, LCOS is the first technology to even better 3-chip DLP projection.) and one with a lower end HD20 from Optoma (DLP).

The contrast difference between the two is vaaaaast, but the Optoma has amazing shadow detail so projecting onto reflective grey cinema paint makes the images glooow (after proper calibration!).

Why do I start with this? First of all, you need to calibrate your display properly for D65 colour and greyscale tracking needs to be smoooooooooth. Why?

Ok, first colour: all these modern codecs (AVC, VC-1, mpeg-2) rely on your eyes shortcoming in seeing detail in colour as well as detail in the grey scale. I can look at an image and tell you how the grey scale is set. Colour is VERY hard for me. It’s the same for you, btw. Just how we were made. ;-) so these codecs compress colour MORE than luminance, but even so not all colours are compressed the same amount and actually REDs will be compressed more than blue (slightly less compression) and green (least compression). Just talk to any of the guys coding for these compression methods. It’s one of the tricks in the book, so to speak. This is why red can appear blocky on some mpeg-2 compressed video. The encoder used this trick to allocate more to the other channels. Yuk. Now if you have any red shift in the image (it being too warm), your eyes may actually perceive that as a drop in resolution! Why? Because your eyes are a lot more sensitive to green and blue detail and when those colours are de-emphasised, you will perceive it as such.

Generally speaking encoders will compress the colour information 4x as much as luminance(related to greyscale). Ok so how can the players compensate for this when playing back? Well, they can either just pass the decoded info to the display and let the display interpolate or it can do the interpolation and display a better variation of colour than was on the disk to begin with. This is where hi-precision colour (10-12bits per channel) comes into play even though the disks are encoded with only 8bits per channel (and even then some channels are compressed more to save bits). Panasonic’s latest Uniphier processor (the higher end 2009 version with adaptive interpolation) does this quite brilliantly even for SD de-interlaced material. Pioneer has been doing this (without putting a marketing term on it) amazingly. Just have ONE look at a pioneer playing back DVDs or Blu ray and you will know what I mean. Player DO differ in how they interpolate the loss in compression in colour and no, the PS3 is not the best. Maybe on your un-calibrated 40”-50” plasma you can’t see because it’s already overblowing colours, pushing towards red in any part of that greyscale but definitely not on a 102” screen after proper calibration. There is a HUUUGE difference between a player using uniphier or pioneer’s own chips and the PS3. The PS3 is simply passing the compressed colour AND on top of that it’s overblowing them to make them have more “pop”. All it does is make the image lose fidelity.

Greyscale: you will see a non-linear greyscale as a crushing of blacks, loss of shadow detail, bleaching of whites, less detail in other parts of the image. Now this is again a huge difference in players. The pioneers and higher end Denons, Marantz and some other brands simply excel at this. Mind you, with Pioneer, they are setting the black level a tad low so you need to increase it a notch not to crush blacks. But once properly calibrated, the image will appear to have more detail, more 3D-like look, etc. The PS3 doesn’t do very well here I’m afraid. The shadow detail is average, the whites are bleached. Looks fine until you see what high-end players are capable of.

I have compared the PS3 with other players on a 102” screen with projectors having AMAZING contrast levels and also with lower-end models. Once properly calibrated, the difference is night and day in colour reproduction and greyscale tracking. The PS3 is a great machine. The audio jitter is amazingly low (for the first generation model. The PS3 slim is a lot worse). But no, it’s a basic blu ray player and there is a big big difference to some dedicated players if your screen allows for it.

I just wanted to clear that up because I’ve seen so much bull from even “experienced” people until I decided to have a look myself.