Question about blu ray & displays?

[jbrillo]

I was at a Sams the other day shopping for stuff for my Super Bowl party. So, as always, I check out the TV's they've got for sale. I see a Sony Bravia flatscreen & some cheap Phillips flatscreen. Now they're both hooked up to blu ray players. On the Sony, they've got Speedracer playing & on the Phillips, National Treasure is playing. Both TV's seem to have incredible life like pictures, they're almost 3D like.......even on the cheap Phillips TV.

At home, I've got a 61-inch Samsung LED DLP TV(bought in Oct. '07) in my living room and a 42-inch LG LCD(bought in Aug. '08) in my kids gameroom. Now I'm not as technically savvy as others, but I at least have both TV's calibrated using the video calibration from a THX certified DVD. Perhaps not quite ISF calibration, but it's the best that I could do. I've hooked up my PS3 to both televisions and while blu rays look better than DVD's, they lacked "something" that even the cheap Phillips seemed to have. At first I thought it may have been b/c it was on a DLP TV, but it still didn't look like that on the LCD. Also, I am sure I have the proper settings for my PS3. I read the extensive PS3 FAQ on AVSforums. Also, if it helps, the PS3 was run through a Pioneer Elite VSX-72TXV to the LED DLP and was run through a Yamaha RX-V661 to the LCD using HDMI on both.

If someone could help clear this up for me, I'd greatly appreciate it. I wish I could better explain the differences I saw, but I can't. All I can say is that both my displays seemed to be lacking some type of 3D-ness to them that even a cheap Phillips LCD can do with a blu ray player. Any help in explaining this is appreciated.

 

[BMXTRIX]

You were likely looking at displays which used 120hz refresh and provided intermediary frame interpolation.

So, they took the original 24 frames per second (FPS) that is on the Blu-ray Disc, and then converted it to 120 frames per second.

This produces a very '3D' look to what you see, which I think looks like complete and total garbage. Seriously, go back and look at it. The edges of the people moving are INCREDIBLY sharp - all blurring has been removed. This is not the way the human eye perceives motion, and you end up with an effect that is almost like a strobe light. You lose the smooth transition between forground and background objects.

While some people do like this, and you may be one of them, I think the more I view 120hz displays with frame interpolation, the less that I like them. You are probably far better off with your existing displays

I can tell you that on my 60" Pioneer, fed via component video, Blu-ray looks far better than the DVDs I have been viewing.

 

[jostenmeat]

what he said^:

frame interpolation

if you use it, you WILL sometimes get artifacting when the processor cannot keep up with the speed of the film. From anything more subtle to a foot looking messed up when a kid is running, to something silly like having three footballs in the air.

isn't it funny that the only technology that uses it is LCD, both in the flat panel world and the PJ world...

 

[jbrillo]

Thanks for the explanation guys. So I suppose the look is aritficial & not necessarily the intended look. Well, that's good to know.

 

[jostenmeat]

Thanks for the explanation guys. So I suppose the look is aritficial & not necessarily the intended look. Well, that's good to know.

Yeah. Each company designs their own algorithm. Indeed, they are faking/guessing/approximating what any given frame might look like between the true frames given to you by any film or video.

The higher the setting, the more frames are interpolated between the real ones, or so is my guess. As I noted, the processor/algorithm has a harder time "keeping up" with fast moving video.

 

[Pyrrho]

The problem with the 120 Hz theory is that we are supposedly talking about a "cheap" Philips TV. I don't think the cheaper ones have that capability.

Another possibility is that the new TVs are better than the old ones, as they do keep improving them.

Of course, it could also be that the contrast (or whatever) is unnaturally high in the store, and some people are attracted to unnatural pictures.

Really, there is no way we can tell what was going on with TVs where we don't even know the model numbers, much less how things were set.

 

[Jeff R.]

One very simple question....I assume you are using a HMDI cable? I just wanted to be sure we did not over look something obvious.