I don't get it, BD-P1000

[BTBuck1]

for weeks now i've read review after review about Blu-Ray and how poor the discs look, how bad the player is yadah yadah yadah.

Well today I sat down with another member of this forum (provenflipper) and we decided to do a shootout of Blu-Ray.

He is currently on loan of a BD-P1000 and he owns about 95% of the blu-ray titles available so we had a wide spectrum of titles to play around with.

The titles we looked at where from the Worst rated BR titles to the Best.

House of flying daggers
xXx
Saw
Stealth
lord of war

We started off with xXx, this film has received some poor marks from some critics, and shining reviews from others. Now when we first put it in we put it on the scene where Vin parachutes out of a corvette thats flying off a bridge. We started the scene when the cars is stolen and watched until they are flipping the cops off as they speed away.

Watching the scene I noticed some film grain. But overall was somewhat happy with the image. This scene is difficult to judge because there are camera angles designed to "look" like it was shot from a handy-cam. So ofcourse those scenes look standard def, it's by design. However when the production cameras shoot the guys shooting the movie, it's on par with most HD i've seen. ProvenFlipper and I both looked at eachother and gave the Nod that we thought it looked great.

I wouldn't be convinced however until we got the standard DVD in there and compared. So we tested the same scene over again, the DVD was in an xbox360 and the BR in the BD-P1000 well, this was a cut and dry easy decision, the DVD looked Horrendous in comparison. The BR short of amazing in contrast.
We both agree'd it wasn't a fair comparo since the DVD wasn't pushed to it's max ability (via upconvert) so we tossed the DVD into the sammy and gave it a run.

This is where things got interesting. I've read several times that the sammy Br player is a terrible upconvert player. Well we put xXx DVD in it and WOW what a differance. Night & day almost. But guess what...still not comparing to the BR. On a scale of 1-10 then i'd give the dvd over component at 480p a 4, the upconverted DVD a 6 and the BR an 8.5
Blu-ray showed to make a conciderable differance in PQ. Quickly viewing a scene where Vin Deisels neck has the xXx tatoo was lightyears ahead in detail, color, contrast etc.


Next up we wanted to look at the "best" that Blu-Ray had to offer. We popped in STEALTH. This disc was definately the BEST no Joke HD content i've seen to date. I've spent some time with a few HDDVD titles, and none looked as good as this. HOWEVER, the titles I viewed from HDDVD where Apollo 13 (known 540p issue), Phantom of the Opera & Last samurai. and I don't know how they rank among other HDDVD's in the PQ department. Aside from the movie "Tremors" which was also awesome, that I saw on Universal HD. This was the Best HD PQ movie-wise i'd seen period. get it? got it? good!

Moving right along,

We wanted to test a "lions-gate" offering. There are known "stutter" issues on LG films on BR during DTS playback, and so I requested that DTS track be opted for. We put in "SAW"

I had recently seen SAW on HBOHD so i figured i could give a credible comparison. Recalling what I had seen on HBOHD It was ported to HD pretty well on the Broadcast. I felt watching it On BluRay that it was about on par with what I had seen, if not slightly better. Seemed some edge enhancement was taking place, that or the sharpness is just that good on Blu-Ray. Colors popped off the screen and contrast between blackest black and whitest white were up to my standard (which IMO is high) I did notice the slight studder. but it happens so fast and so infrequent you could miss it if you blinked, and it didn't take away from the film IMO. I am also guessing it's a Hardware issue since it does not happen on DolbyDigital ex mode. on a scale of 1-10 i'd give saw the same rating I gave tripple X about a 8-8.5 i'd take a half a point away for the studder and aside from that nothing else. BTW the DTS track was VERY good and close in Quality to the Lossless PCM i heard on xXx.

I wanted to see the Worst Blu-Ray had to offer. So we put in House of flying daggers. Some of you may recall my mentioning that I had a dubbed JDM version of HOFD with DTS audio track. That experience in PQ was very very bad. The recorded version I had suffered terribly from Grain, oversaturated whites and what appeared to be a poor master as well. It was so bad though that trying to distinguish what the cause was wasn't even worth it, so I just tryed to watch the movie and see what the hype was about. Well the bootleg DVD "soundwise" kept me in the movie the entire time. The PQ made me want to puke but the sound was great! So when it came to looking at the BR disc I already had a bad taste in my mouth as far as PQ was concerned with this title. Let me first say, this is the worst "PQ-Wise" BR has to offer. HOWEVER, I concider this a must have film if you love your audio equipment. I'll touch more on the audio in a moment. The PQ on the BR is what the DVD should have been. I had originally like i said viewed the DVD on a bootleg, it sucked. I saw it when it finally came to the U.S. on dvd, and the PQ was better than my bootleg, but not much (just didn't have the macroblocking) still oversaturated whites, grainy and blury, But it was also missing the DTS track which was sorely missed. The DTS track was the only reason to own the DVD. Watching the BR you could IMMEDIATELY notice the differance. yes, it wasn't fabulous, hell it wasn't even good...just ok...but it was consistantly mediocre which makes me feal that it was a poor master (original filmstock) used. This movie has the look & feal of a Kung Foo movie from the 1970's and It makes me wonder if the stock chosen was to make it fit in with the genre. I've now seen how wonderful BR can look, so I can't blame the format or the compression method for this film. All i can do is view it for what it is. An excellent adventure with probably the best damn sound effects i've heard short of the first time I saw Jurrassic park or LADDER49 in the theatre. This movie looks appreciably better than the DVD and night & day better than my bootleg. But the real win here was that as good as the DTS track was on jdmDVD, the PCM lossless track blew it outta the MF'n water. I'd give this movie a 4 or 5 in PQ, the colors are good and some scenes look ok, but it has a look that I can't figure out. Artifacts or filmgrain? (you decide) it keeps me from giving such an otherwise masterpeice a reccomend if based soley on PQ. If you go into this however with the prior experience I have had with the film, you will fall in love all over again. I looked past the lack of stun factor visually and let my other sensory take over. This movies soundtrack is breathtaking and worth a purchase on sound alone! SOUND QUALITY IS A PERFECT 10!!!!!!

So, to recap my experience with the BD-P1000, i'd have to say that after some time playing around with it I'd have to give this player a firm Reccomend for the early adopter crowd. I don't see the faults others do with this player. I've seen some movies that others bashed that I thought where appreciably better than their DVD counterparts. They are on par with what i've seen from Cable HD over HDMI minus bandwidth motion aritfacting-blocking which is what i expected from Blu-Ray. I didn't expect BR to look better than Cable-HD (aside from cable/sat HD caveats) but guess what, it did. And it did this with a player that has a known issue with a softening effect in it's video proccessing unit. This begs the question from me...You mean to tell me it gets better than this? SIGN ME UP!!!!

So I can only conclude four things, 1) HDDVD has something I have yet to see. 2) people need glasses, or their tv's calibrated. 3) There are some people out there that just want to Rain on the BR parade (HDDVD Owners) or 4) Maybe I just have the love goggles on. but I saw what I saw, and I will continue to collect BR movies in anticipation of oct 25th BDP-S1 day!



Thanks for reading and please don't flame me, this is just my opinion.
Brian