New 4K blu ray players

[BijouMan]

Originally Posted by Vilya

A $1000 4K disc player that can't play a DVD anywhere near as well as a $70 blu-ray player, can't play a SACD, and that can't play a wide variety of common video files has no equal? There are 4K disc players that cost a fraction as much that can do all of the above with ease.

Geoff D puts it best:

Whenever I play a DVD-Video I always set the player to 480p so my display can upscale the video.

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by BijouMan

Whenever I play a DVD-Video I always set the player to 480p so my display can upscale the video.

That doesn't solve the problem as I believe has already been explained to you.

Originally Posted by Geoff D

That's the problem though: the Pannysonics don't present an unmolested 480i output that the TV can then upscale, it'll only go down to 480p and this still bakes in their cack-handed deinterlacing no matter what you do. I even tried forcing a 1080i output to see if that would help but nope, it's just re-interlacing the already-deinterlaced (and jaggy AF) signal. If the Pannys had a proper source direct mode then we wouldn't be having this discussion.

[LordoftheRings]

There must be cheap DVD players that are adept @ good DVD playback performance, no?

* Which 4K Blu-ray player today has the best DVD playback?

Last time I played one of those must have been before the turn of this new century ... 2006, sixteen years ago? It's been a very long time anyway ... a decade or so.
I retired my Toshiba DVD player (SD-3107 with a headphone jack/dedicated volume control) way back then.

Today try to find a 4K BR player with a headphone jack. ...Same for a phone.
It's like a slap in the face.

Too many good flicks not enough time.

[BijouMan]

Originally Posted by Vilya

That doesn't solve the problem as I believe has already been explained to you.

Nevertheless, DVDs seem to look better than I have ever seen them, even my personal DVDs.

[BijouMan]

Originally Posted by LordoftheRings

There must be cheap DVD players that are adept @ good DVD playback performance, no?

* Which 4K Blu-ray player today has the best DVD playback?

Last time I played one of those must have been before the turn of this new century ... 2006, sixteen years ago? It's been a very long time anyway ... a decade or so.
I retired my Toshiba DVD player (SD-3107 with a headphone jack/dedicated volume control) way back then.

Today try to find a 4K BR player with a headphone jack. ...Same for a phone.
It's like a slap in the face.

Too many good flicks not enough time.

Want to play your UHD Blu-ray discs through your headphones? Just plug them into your display and set the output to be variable.

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by BijouMan

Nevertheless, DVDs seem to look better than I have ever seen them, even my personal DVDs.

You must be easy to please is all that I can say. Look at the images that Geoff posted comparing how a DVD looked on an Oppo 203 vs. a Panasonic 820:

Originally Posted by Geoff D

The crazy thing is that the Pannys ace the DVD test patterns like CUE and the chroma multibursts and cadence detection and whatnot, I mean they look perfick, far better than they do on the OPPO 203. But the jaggies test pattern gives it away, the swinging bar is jagged as hell on all the angles as it swings back and forth and when you play real world content it's right there too, it's like the upsampling engine is so intent on REBUILDING THE CHROMA, MUST REBUILD THE CHROMA!!! that it ignores the niceties like halfway decent deinterlacing...which kinda sucks when dealing with a format that is literally always stored as interlaced material.

This is totally and utterly unscientific but below are some crappy cellphone photos of the Hockey clip from the Spears & Munsil DVD included with the HD Benchmark disc. This is a piece designed to be a torture test, shot on what looks like Video8 tape or something and it's grotty as hell, right, but what any competent deinterlacer should be doing is rendering the diagonals as smoothly as possible. Instead the Panny 820 makes the hockey sticks look like they've been half-inched from Minecraft and no, I'm not being hyperbolic.

Again: these are terrible cellphone photos (something I don't normally do, I use an actual camera camera) so ignore things like the colour tinting, moiré from the screen, visible clumps of pixels, and just look at the hockey stick the kid is holding. Same frame on each. Nicely smooth on the OPPO 203, jagged AF on the 820. There's more ringing on the Panny with the default video settings too. And this is nothing to do with only displaying fields when paused or whatever, this is exactly how it looks in motion as well. And also no, it's not because "the source is shit" or whatever, this manifests in day to day viewing with whatever 480i content I dare to watch on it (which isn't often).

Panny 820




OPPO 203



PS

Just one more thing: the Pannys also have a bug when playing SD content stored on a Blu-ray, again it's very badly jagged and even the test patterns show it, e.g. https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...5#post14660725. This is something that even David Mackenzie documented.

The hockey stick don't lie.

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by LordoftheRings

There must be cheap DVD players that are adept @ good DVD playback performance, no?

* Which 4K Blu-ray player today has the best DVD playback?

The point isn't that there are no good "cheap DVD players."

The point is that a $1000 Panasonic 4K disc player should be able to play a DVD as good or better than any other disc player priced as much or less than itself. I don't want to have to use a separate player to get the best from each format; I expect a backwards compatible 4K disc player that costs four figures to do an excellent job with all supported disc formats. It's not an unreasonable expectation.

[LordoftheRings]

Originally Posted by BijouMan

Want to play your UHD Blu-ray discs through your headphones? Just plug them into your display and set the output to be variable.

Bluetooth?

[LordoftheRings]

Originally Posted by Vilya

The point isn't that there are no good "cheap DVD players."

The point is that a $1000 Panasonic 4K disc player should be able to play a DVD as good or better than any other disc player priced as much or less than itself. I don't want to have to use a separate player to get the best from each format; I expect a backwards compatible 4K disc player that costs four figures to do an excellent job with all supported disc formats. It's not an unreasonable expectation.

The Oppo DVD days are over; get a grip.

[Compson]

^^^^I don’t share your faith in the hockey stick. I see the jagged hockey stick on my Panny 9000 in slow motion or freeze frame but not at regular speed.

I recently acquired an Oppo BDP-83 to compare. I’m outputting both the Oppo and the Panny at 480p to a video processor for scaling, and then to a Sony 4K projector with its Motionflow setting on Off. If I freeze the Oppo and then back-step, I get a hockey stick that looks worse than the Panny’s. I took a picture but can’t figure out how to attach it. The point, though, is the images illustrate how the players generate stills of difficult material. My Sony BDP-S6700 produces the best hockey-stick stills of the three players but doesn’t do as well on some real material (such as the Homecoming: A Christmas Story DVD I watched at Christmas, which the Panny handled better).

Viewing the Spears & Munsil montage, the Oppo is better than the Panny in some spots (such as the car hood a man is polishing before the hockey clips), but they both do a nice job. I don’t doubt that some Panny owners have had a different experience (and some people who aren’t Panny owners accept what they’ve read). I wonder if the type of display and its interaction with the Panny are somehow responsible for the difference, though I have no idea why that would be the case.

[ronand]

On my UB450 I find changing the "Progressive" option manually to "Video" during playback improves the picture on 576i dvds quite a bit.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by Compson

^^^^I don’t share your faith in the hockey stick. I see the jagged hockey stick on my Panny 9000 in slow motion or freeze frame but not at regular speed.

I recently acquired an Oppo BDP-83 to compare. I’m outputting both the Oppo and the Panny at 480p to a video processor for scaling, and then to a Sony 4K projector with its Motionflow setting on Off. If I freeze the Oppo and then back-step, I get a hockey stick that looks worse than the Panny’s. I took a picture but can’t figure out how to attach it. The point, though, is the images illustrate how the players generate stills of difficult material. My Sony BDP-S6700 produces the best hockey-stick stills of the three players but doesn’t do as well on some real material (such as the Homecoming: A Christmas Story DVD I watched at Christmas, which the Panny handled better).

Viewing the Spears & Munsil montage, the Oppo is better than the Panny in some spots (such as the car hood a man is polishing before the hockey clips), but they both do a nice job. I don’t doubt that some Panny owners have had a different experience (and some people who aren’t Panny owners accept what they’ve read). I wonder if the type of display and its interaction with the Panny are somehow responsible for the difference, though I have no idea why that would be the case.

As I tried to underline during that post o’ mine: it’s not just doing it to paused fields, in motion the diagonals are significantly more jagged on the 820, as is the jaggies test with the swinging bar turning through different degrees. And it’s not solely the jaggies but the ringing too, there’s plenty more ‘edge enhancement’ on the Panny. That frame wasn’t cherry picked either, I literally just hit pause when it was playing on the Panny and then lined up the OPPO 203 to match. And it’s nothing to do with the TV at my end.

The caveat here, if there is one, is that I’m using a European deck and despite having a legacy of 60Hz compatibility in our players since the dawn of DVD perhaps they done ****ed up the deinterlacing for 60Hz content somehow. David Mackenzie uses a US Panny to QC his DVDs and if something’s ****y then he’d surely know. But I’m not gonna spend a ridonkulous amount of cash to import one just to test this theory out.

Originally Posted by ronand

On my UB450 I find changing the "Progressive" option manually to "Video" during playback improves the picture on 576i dvds quite a bit.

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.

[Naiera]

Originally Posted by LordoftheRings

Today try to find a 4K BR player with a headphone jack. ...Same for a phone.
It's like a slap in the face.

Get a Topping DX3 Pro+.

[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

[ronand]

It's all PAL dvd that I have here. Watching Swedish Wallander ATM. The only imported dvds that I have are region 5 and they are all PAL.

[Geoff D]

Wallander would appear to have been shot on RED so should be a progressive capture, but maybe it was mastered out to interlaced at source because it's a TV show. But when you say that it "improves" the quality, are you referring to this specific jaggies problem or something else?

[ronand]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Wallander would appear to have been shot on RED so should be a progressive capture, but maybe it was mastered out to interlaced at source because it's a TV show. But when you say that it "improves" the quality, are you referring to this specific jaggies problem or something else?

The jaggies mainly. Even the subtitles are affected by it.