Spears & Munsil 4K UHD HDR Benchmark (Test Discs) May 15, 2023

[sapiendut]

I think you just described Panasonic UB9000.

[p5browne]

Be lucky you can even find a player anymore.
They're already disappearing at an alarming rate!

Re the amazon $10 charge in Canada - $5 for Bezos, and $5 for the ex!

[sapiendut]

Players disappearing? Samsung quit (and they never count regardless) and Oppo quit (they have made their player turned from great value to expensive (although arguably very good). Sony, LG and Pioneer are still there, Panasonic can’t manufacture them fast enough (minimum one month backorder in Canada, 2-3 month backorder in many Asian countries.

[Stacey Spears]

Originally Posted by mrtickleuk

Cool thanks for the info - if it's only from USB I can relax a bit. I have a nasty Samsung K8500 player. Currently considering getting a Panasonic UB820, but not if it has problems. Other players (like Oppo, Pioneer) are ridiculously expensive IMHO and I am simply NOT in the "high-end" market and will not be dragged up there just because I want a decent player that works. It's absurd that my very simple wishlist of features, fulfilled easily by my 20-year-old Sony DVD player and pretty much every other player at the time, seems alien to today's player manufacturers for the mainstream:

1. No fan, and very quiet operation.
2. A front display with "time remaining" count-down visible constantly during a movie.
3. A backlit remote which isn't smaller than my hand.
4. No chroma bugs, unfixed years afterwards. (I'm shocked at the Oppo, that's never mentioned by the owners?)

That's it. But impossible unless I buy something which costs 5x as much as I'm prepared to spend on a disc player. The market for mainstream (not high-end) players is utterly broken after the "race to the bottom", and it's a travesty.

[edit: I didn't intend that to be quite so much of a rant! ]

I have not tested a Samsung player since the day the format launched and it was the only choice. Back then, it also did the wrong up sample for 2020. Hopefully it was fixed.

[Stacey Spears]

Originally Posted by sapiendut

Do you have a link to a pdf version?

We hope to have a PDF guide to the new disc in a couple of weeks. Then a much more in depth guide for advanced patterns by end of summer.

The 2nd edition articles will cover 80-90% of what you need to do. Brightness, color/tint don't change. Contrast is the difficult one to know when to touch. Sharpness is the same as is choosing a color space.

[Cortiz]

Originally Posted by Stacey Spears

It is not fixed on the B7, maybe the 8 series, but the 9 series for sure. This only impacts sending 4:2:0 from USB into the display. If you are using a Panasonic UHD BD player, you are good to go. OPPO has both horizontal and vertical alignment problems depending on 2020 vs. 709.

So this Oppo alignment issue only happens when sending 4:2:0 from USB or does it happens from discs as well?

[DJR662]

Originally Posted by Stacey Spears

We hope to have a PDF guide to the new disc in a couple of weeks. Then a much more in depth guide for advanced patterns by end of summer.

The 2nd edition articles will cover 80-90% of what you need to do. Brightness, color/tint don't change. Contrast is the difficult one to know when to touch. Sharpness is the same as is choosing a color space.

Will there ever be a second edition disc release along with the info on the disc itself (like the HD Benchmark releases), or is this the definite release?

[Scenic Labs]

There are plans for a companion disc for a different purpose (also with the instructions not on the disc), but my understanding from David and Stacey is that the instructions are not in the popups in order to have the ability/space to change nit levels. The amount of space reserved on a BD100 for UHD BD menus is miniscule.

I have suggested that, if there is room, a guided setup program might be a nice addition to a future companion disc since that's what we often think about most when we think about the info on the disc itself. We've also thought about some ways to make it easier to pull up instructions from a mobile device. I believe that we can accomplish this with the existing disc.

Originally Posted by DJR662

Will there ever be a second edition disc release along with the info on the disc itself (like the HD Benchmark releases), or is this the definite release?

[Stacey Spears]

One of the issues with the pop-up instructions is that the IG broke some of the right/good and wrong/bad images. e.g. On the OPPO 93/103, the good and bad images for chroma alignment were backwards on the high quality HDMI out, but were correct for the other HDMI output.

The reason is they composited the graphics in 4:2:2 space on the high quality output but did it in 4:4:4 on the other output. Idea was to not sacrifice image quality if outputting 4:2:2 for graphics quality. So the HDMI 2 was always converted to at least 4:4:4 and then back to 4:2:2 if you were outputting 4:2:2.

We were also limited in space for the on screen help text. With HDR it will also be outdated fast. e.g. The insert says not to touch brightness or contrast. That is what we believed at the time we went to replication. Now, for some displays, we might want to touch contrast. It is display dependent at this point. e.g. Contrast on an LG does nothing to alter clipping, so it should not be touched. The Z9D is another matter all together.

A bigger issue is that the menu system is HD resolution, not UHD, so it is scaled and will break some right and wrong images. It is also difficult to make right and wrong HDR images on a menu system. Basically I would not get to see it until after it was authored and played on a player. The turn around time to make them all correct would be painful.

[p5browne]

Ah, the bliss of modern technology, and competition factors.

Like the Tower of Babel - they all went up to work talking together, and came down at quitting time, all speaking different languages.

Once upon a time, many years ago, a major change came up about every 2 years, now we're down to 6 months or less!

[Cortiz]

Originally Posted by Cortiz

So this Oppo alignment issue only happens when sending 4:2:0 from USB or does it happens from discs as well?

Anyone care to answer this question? Thanks

[David M]

Originally Posted by Scenic Labs

There are plans for a companion disc for a different purpose (also with the instructions not on the disc), but my understanding from David and Stacey is that the instructions are not in the popups in order to have the ability/space to change nit levels. The amount of space reserved on a BD100 for UHD BD menus is miniscule.

Yes, the actual space of interactive graphics is miniscule, but in this case it would have added to the authoring complexity quite a bit for the reasons Stacey mentioned as well as for some others.

Short verson: because the HDR disc has 1,400 patterns on it to account for the different metadata levels, and those nit levels have to be navigable via multiple methods and jumped to at any time, it's a lot more complex than the old versions.

Long version for any BD geeks who want to know exactly why: previous versions of S&M were authored with (as far as I can tell) each pattern in its own playlist and title. In other words, there was a 1:1 relationship between each Clip (the test pattern), Playlist (which references the Clip), and Title (which plays the Playlist and sets other variables) in the BD spec. This worked because there were fewer than 999 test patterns on the disc. In that setup, each Playlist (and therefore each pattern) could easily have its own individual Interactive Graphics attached. (Or they may have been muxed in to the patterns themselves - I didn't author the previous versions so can't say for sure how they were done).

On BD, you can have a high number of Clips and Playlists, but not more than 999 Titles. In SMUHD, we have many patterns, multiplied by 5 for all the different metadata levels. That takes us up to something like 1,400 elements on the disc that have to be individually accessible. So we couldn't just make each one its own Title because of the 999 limit, and had to find another way to make this navigable by the BD player. So, each pattern category is its own title, and bound to that title is a playlist that accesses all the clips in the correct order. In other words, the patterns are stored in their own chapters instead of in their own titles.

Attached to each of those playlists, as a Subpath, is one of about 4 out-of-mux interactive graphics menus. (We have a couple of variants because some of the pattern categories have a gamut choice as well as a luminance once, and some have an audio choice instead - and there are HDR vs SDR versions of the menus). These menus contain the logic for switching between nits levels, gamuts, and/or audio codecs, on the fly. These menus alone needed quite a bit of testing. By not having on-disc help it means we can keep the number of IG menus down to about 4 (not including SDR versions and the Demo Materials popups).

It also meant that if we, say, discovered at the 11th hour that there was a bug in the navigation, we would just need to change code in 4 places instead of 1400 places. We might have been able to get around that by storing the routines that work out the navigation in their own MovieObject, but it could potentially slow things down.

Also - in an HDMV IG menu, there's an upper limit of 16mb for all the graphics in the entire menu (not just on screen at one time). That equates to roughly 8 screens worth of 1920x1080 graphics. Again, not an issue if you have a separate IG for every single pattern, but a big deal if you have to fit 20-30 description screens into memory at one time like we would have had to. (And, to make that limit even more of an issue, that's 16mb AFTER decoding - run length coding doesn't apply - so even if your graphic is a flat gray box vs a fully textured pattern, it takes up the same amount of space in Graphics Memory. Depending on how the graphics are sliced, even transparent pixels can count towards that low 16mb ceiling).

[p5browne]

Is this using a single or dual layered DVD ?

The new Windows 10 64 Bit OS install disc, now requires the dual layer.

[David M]

Originally Posted by p5browne

Is this using a single or dual layered DVD ?

The new Windows 10 64 Bit OS install disc, now requires the dual layer.

None of the above. It’s a BD, not a DVD, and it’s triple layered. 100gb, so far more than a DVD’s 8.5gb.

[Geoff D]

Spotted some gnarly haloing in the Scaling HD pattern on the Panny 420, which highlights how oversharpened 1080p > 4K upscaling actually is out of the box.

All sharpening modes at default settings:



Chroma sharpness -4 and Edge Correction +1



As you can see, in order to get rid of the green chroma crosstalk (dunno if that's exactly what it is, but it sounds cool) and the ringing around contrasting edges then the settings need to be adjusted. BUT you can see that the chroma is now a lot less sharper than it was, bleeding outside the edges, and while Edge Correction +1 removes the luma ringing inherent to the Panny upscaling it can cause artefacts in real world content, e.g. the moiré that I mentioned on the BD of Winter Solder here https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...2#post16329422 (check the second photo comparison) was caused by the Edge Correction on +1.

Long story short: there isn't a 'Goldilocks' setting on the Panny that's juuuuuust right, not for me anyway. The chroma sharpening is built into the upscaled image at a fundamental level so turning it down will get rid of the green haloing but will also drastically reduce chroma resolution, and while Edge Correction to +1 removes the baked-in ringing it can and does cause artefacts elsewhere. Gah.

[Stacey Spears]

Originally Posted by Cortiz

Anyone care to answer this question? Thanks

Displays have vertical alignment issues with 2020 content from USB because 2020 changed the location of the chroma samples compared to 709. Instead of being interstitial, it is now co-sited with luma vertically. That results in a 0.5 shift in chroma relative to luma.


The USB is separate from the OPPO alignment issues. Going from memory, I believe it was horizontal for 2020 and both horizontal and vertical for 709 on the OPPO.

[kristoffer]

It amazes me to a high degree that no companies have been able to match or even better Oppo on pure untampered PQ. I mean the 203 was released three years ago!

[Stacey Spears]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Spotted some gnarly haloing in the Scaling HD pattern on the Panny 420, which highlights how oversharpened 1080p > 4K upscaling actually is out of the box.

As you can see, in order to get rid of the green chroma crosstalk (dunno if that's exactly what it is, but it sounds cool) and the ringing around contrasting edges then the settings need to be adjusted. BUT you can see that the chroma is now a lot less sharper than it was, bleeding outside the edges, and while Edge Correction +1 removes the luma ringing inherent to the Panny upscaling it can cause artefacts in real world content, e.g. the moiré that I mentioned on the BD of Winter Solder here https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...2#post16329422 (check the second photo comparison) was caused by the Edge Correction on +1.

Long story short: there isn't a 'Goldilocks' setting on the Panny that's juuuuuust right, not for me anyway. The chroma sharpening is built into the upscaled image at a fundamental level so turning it down will get rid of the green haloing but will also drastically reduce chroma resolution, and while Edge Correction to +1 removes the baked-in ringing it can and does cause artefacts elsewhere. Gah.

The chroma ringing is overshoot from their scaling filter. While it does go away at -4, so does the detail in the chroma resolution patches on the color space eval pattern. I decided to leave it at default myself. The odd ringing mostly goes away on the SDR version of the pattern, which is good since most of the HD will be SDR.

Edit: Just did a quick test using the Luma Zone Plate on the 2nd edition. With Edge at 0, it is nice and clean. At +1, you see moire (four groups of circles) on the left and right sides of the Zone Plate. The Winter Soldier scene is nice because it is a real world scene.

[mrtickleuk]

Originally Posted by sapiendut

I think you just described Panasonic UB9000.

Absolutely, definitely, not!

I repeat, in case you missed this bit: I am simply NOT in the "high-end" market and will not be dragged up there just because I want a decent player that works.

That player is the high-end top-of-the-range and costs TRIPLE the cost of the UB820. It's not a helpful answer, sorry, because I was so very clear.

The market for mainstream (not high-end) players is utterly broken after the "race to the bottom", and it's a travesty.

(And it still doesn't meet my requirements anyway! It's got a fan! )

[mrtickleuk]

Originally Posted by Stacey Spears

I have not tested a Samsung player since the day the format launched and it was the only choice.

I don't blame you. I really don't like it, and I can see how it is a "distress purchase" - but it was a very good offer at the time. I'm hoping to sell it to a "greater fool", but time is against me.