He didn't say that though, just that good upscaling reduces the improvement provided by Blu-ray, not that it eliminates it.Hmmm. From the original ZD article: What utter b*llocks! It's depressing enough that consumers think that "upscaling players" actually convert SD into HD. For a professional journalist to say it is beyond depressing.
Blu-ray is dead - heckuva job, Sony!
- Thread starter Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
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you didn't believe Blu-ray AVC movies went as high as 40mbps (video alone), and now you think 40mbps is insufficient ? BD-50 is more than sufficient to handle 1080p up to 40mbps and lossless audio. Individual movie quality will depend on many factors (e.g., production resources). You can easily find great looking ones and not so good transfers. As for extras, it depends on how genereous the studios are. The more the merrier as long as it doesn't jack up the price.
Hmmm. From the original ZD article: What utter b*llocks! It's depressing enough that consumers think that "upscaling players" actually convert SD into HD. For a professional journalist to say it is beyond depressing.
People who compare DVD upscaling to Blu-ray are more price sensitive. They typically also ignore Blu-ray's other advantages. You will only be able to convince them when the price hits their budget.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1089714
Here is just one thread talking about the quality of the transfer. Ignore the aspect changes (due to imax fotage)
i'd have to spend some time searching for other threads as some of them are older and they move fast there.
Here is just one thread talking about the quality of the transfer. Ignore the aspect changes (due to imax fotage)
i'd have to spend some time searching for other threads as some of them are older and they move fast there.
And you know this how?
The actual movie quality will depend on a number of factors. They are not usually the result of Blu-ray limitations. The source, the transfer process, budget, etc. are important too. The Dark Knight example is only 24mbps while the specs allow up to 40mbps. Did you even read the thread ?
As Arwin pointed out, there are good review on the Hulk too.
What he said is that it "dramatically cuts the video quality advantage of BluRay". That simply isn't true. If he had said that it "cuts the video quality advantage of BluRay by an amount that is barely noticeable in normal usage" that would have been accurate.
He's falling into the trap of thinking that upscaling players do something which normally doesn't happen; in other words that if you buy an upscaling player then what you watch (he thinks) will then be "upscaled" but that what you were watching beforehand (he thinks) is "not upscaled". Actually it's simply a change from watching video that has been upscaled by the TV to watching video that is upscaled by the player; you're already watching "upscaled" video, regardless of whether you have an upscaling player or not. It's as "upscaled" as it's ever going to get.
The player may do a somewhat better job of deinterlacing and scaling than your TV does, but the difference is likely to be quite subtle.
The people who manufacture upscaling players depend on the average consumer not understanding this and thinking that the players do something new and magical - that they actually convert SD into HD. For a journalist to reinforce this really makes me very miserable.
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IIRC (from some work a couple of years back so take with the usual granule of NaCl), you may need to support up to 50Mb/s for some required profiles on HD.
Yeah, I looked at the thread too and all the complaints seemed to be related to post-processing (DNR, EE, etc.). Even more ironic they reference other BluRay releases that use similar bitrates but do look 'reference quality'.
Where did you get your window to inside the reviewer's head? Or are you just getting worked up over what you think "he thinks"?
Perhaps he is just speaking based on theory as you suggest, but I doubt it. There is a notable difference between good upscaling and the basic upscaling built into many HDTVs. I'd wager he is speaking in from his experiences in seeing such differences.
Mintmaster
Veteran
I used to think the same thing, and upscaling players from several years ago didn't show any noticeable improvement to me in the stores despite the salesman pitches. However, there was a thread on B3D where people showed comparisons that changed my mind. I can only assume that current and upcoming upscaling DVD players are capable of the same thing. Couple this with BD not coming across as well as it could due to typical HDTV sizes, viewing distances, and visual accuities, and his statement is not off base at all.
It's a lot more than just deinterlacing. Edge detection and halo-free enhancement along with fractal interpolation can do wonders to a low resolution image.
I'm not saying that upscaled SD can match HD. However, if image-processed DVD can qualitatively look like unprocessed 700p, that is indeed a dramatic cut in the advantage of BR for most viewing environments.
Remember that for anyone that has more than one DVD player, particularly those who use portable players, laptops as players, or players built into their car, then there is a substantial disadvantage to buying BR, so price, image quality, and extra features have to add up to something that negates this.
XDE reviews are very mixed (Some recommended turning the upscaling off). I think there are better upscalers in the business. Toshiba is rumored to be working on a XDE + Blu-ray player for next year.
If you want a Blu-ray player, there are quite a few options as mentioned in the OP (DVD upscaling, NetFlix enabled, Playstation Network enabled, soon BlockBuster too). The cheapest -- with promotion -- is already around $150 or less.
If you want a Blu-ray player, there are quite a few options as mentioned in the OP (DVD upscaling, NetFlix enabled, Playstation Network enabled, soon BlockBuster too). The cheapest -- with promotion -- is already around $150 or less.
I was engaged in video compression for a long time, as a hobby and professionally, mainly on the user side. I spent, literally, weeks of my life doing compressability tests for a project. Unless you have really crazy source material (high contrast random noise) movies are highly compressable. They usually contain a lot of scenes where the best image quality is reached with a relatively low bit-rate. In this scenes giving more bits to a frame does not yield an increase in perceived image quality. So just because a movie does not have a high average bitrate that does not mean image quality is bad. And since encoders tend to improve over time it is pretty likely that average bitrate will even decrease in the future.
aaronspink
Veteran
X264 720P 4-5 Mb/s re-encodes are in the 4-5 GB range and can be streamed real time to a large number of users in the US and the rest of the world. 5 Mb/s ABR @ 720P provides within the same ballpark of quality as BR and lets face, considering the encode quality on a lot of BR is BAD to begin with...
I've got some 720P movies with an ABR in the range you describe (some a little higher), some I also have in Blu-ray. Guess which looks better on my 42" 1080P plasma, even at 9' away.
Who said anything about downloads?
Dunno off-hand, lemme check.
Most seem to be 384kbps.
Edit: MP3
I got a movie channel subscription that comes with one HD channel that broadcasts at this quality I think. It's definitely a step up from SD (the subtitles alone ...
) but it's a far cry still from BluRay.Similar threads
