A Gadget Story, Part 3

[techieMoe]

In case you missed parts 1 and 2, here you go:

A Gadget Story
A Gadget Story, Part 2

This should establish me as a technology enthusiast, early adopter, and overall crazy person. To recap, I've researched and bought a High-Definition Television (HDTV), a High-Definition DVD player (HD-DVD), and an upconverting regular DVD player.

I've also been gifted a Samsung HT-WX70T 5-disc wireless surround sound system with HDMI inputs. I'm not telling you all this to brag, because all of my components are the cheapest I could find that had decent enough performance. I'm not *that* crazy.

In case you missed my update to the HD-DVD article, or have been living under a proverbial rock for the past few months, the HD-DVD format is essentially dead. Toshiba has ceased making players for it and studios are busy having fire sales on any old movies they
released in the format. The "war" is over, and I chose the Beta.

Rather than get mad about it, I decided to do some research on the other side. After all, you take a risk with any new technology that something else could render it obsolete. I got a good solid year and a half of use out of the HD-A2 player, and it still plays regular DVDs just fine for my brother, who inherited it.

Shopping Around

Last week at my local Sam's Club (a discount warehouse store for those unfamiliar) I saw a flat of Sony BluRay players for under $300. One was newer and sold for $277, the other was first-generation and sold for $195. I was intrigued. Since the demise of HD-DVD I'd not really paid attention to BR players since they were all around the $400-500 range. In other words, WAY out of my price range.

As you may remember from my HD-DVD purchase, $300 and below is the point where I start to consider a gadget. I decided to do some research. Unlike HD-DVD, the BluRay standard wasn't entirely finished when the first players started coming out, so there are new features on discs you buy today that won't work with players you bought a year ago. Naturally, I was concerned that if I bought a player, it needed to be as future-proof as possible.

First I considered the PS3, since by all the research I'd done it apparently is the most future-proof. It also has a very short load time, which after my experience with the HD-A2 player I am particularly concerned about. However I'm not interested in any of the games that have come out for the PS3 thus far
and I'd essentially be paying $200 more for a game system I wouldn't use. Size was also a concern, since I already have two very large decks in my entertainment center (cable DVR, stereo receiver).

After considering all this, I decided a stand-alone player was probably a better option. However, which one? The research I did said that the third-generation players were the way to go, since they support all the new whiz-bang features of the BluRay standard and also have ethernet for updates (something HD-DVD had from the beginning, but I digress).

The player I saw at Sam's Club was a Sony BDP-BX1. I'd never heard of that model before, so I looked around on various AV forums. I determined that the player was really a re-branded version of another deck, the Sony BDP-S350. This deck has received high marks, and also sells for nearly $400. The BX1 had a few small improvements aside from being half-price: a backlit remote and an included HDMI cable. I decided to pounce.

Unboxing and Setting up the Sony BDP-BX1

The player itself has about the dimensions of a medium-sized regular DVD player. It's half as deep as my Toshiba HD-A2 and lighter than the stereo receiver. The backlit remote and HDMI cables were indeed in the box. I unwrapped everything, plugged in the ethernet cable and checked for updates. There was one available. I updated the player.

After the update I was curious to see how long it took from a cold startup to watching a movie. I'd already picked up a BluRay of The Fifth Element, a movie which I've owned on just about every format available (VHS, DVD, Superbit DVD, BluRay, but not Laserdisc). From cold start it took roughly 30 seconds to get the tray to eject and no more than 10 seconds for the menu on the BluRay to show up.

I played around with some of the settings on the player and saw and option for a "Fast Boot," which basically means the player doesn't really turn off, it just "sleeps" when you hit the power button so it can get up and running quicker. I enabled this option and the time it takes to boot and eject the tray went down to 8 seconds, roughly on par with a regular single-DVD player. I'm happy with that.

The menus for the BX1 are very similar to the PS3 or PSP, if you've ever seen them. Essentially all the options are offered in a single row, left to right, with icons. When you highlight an icon, more options show up in a column top to bottom. The menus felt pleasantly polished, and had no perceivable lag.

Playing with it

The Fifth Element looks very nice on BluRay, but let's be honest: it's an old title. There's only so much retouching and remastering that can be done to a movie that's over a decade old. Newer movies (CG-animated ones in particular) are the real things that show off high-definition discs. I learned that when I watched Freedom: Volume 1 on HD-DVD a while back. I originally wanted to pick up Pixar's Cars, but at the moment the BluRay is just too expensive ($25-30 at most locations), so I settled on TMNT, last year's CGI treatment of one of my favorite campy action series. I picked it up for around $20.

TMNT was stellar in high-definition. The animations were crisp and detailed. There were scenes in the rain where you could see individual drops running off the characters, and a fight scene at the end where you could count the leaves on the trees in the background. I was impressed.

BluRay was only part of the equation, though. One of the only reasons I considered a high-def player was that it also claimed to upconvert my existing DVD collection, which I have no intention of replacing with BluRay any time soon. I tested the regular DVD playback of the BDP-BX1 with Season 1: Disc 4 of Boston Legal and the OVA release of the anime series Fooly Cooly (FLCL). The colors and lines on FLCL were crisp and clear, with only a small amount of fuzz here and there. Boston Legal looked just fine. It was obviously not high-definition, but it was also not obviously fuzzy.

What's Next?

The Sony BDP-BX1 is a great player of both BluRay and regular DVDs, and with the fast boot option it takes no more time to load than its DVD predecessors. The fact that it's under $300 (and probably falling with the upcoming Christmas season) is icing on the cake. I hope to enjoy this deck for some time to come.

My next gadget is never really something I plan out beforehand. Usually I just see something at a store that catches my eye, then start researching, then decide what I want and buy it. If I were to guess, the weak link of my current setup is our stereo receiver, which doesn't have as many inputs as I'd like and has some issues with our DVR box when switching between HD and standard-definition programming. Meanwhile, I'll shop around for BluRay bargains, and rent a lot of BluRays off Netflix.

[Cool01]

Some of my favorite DVDs for testing video playback are "Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence". "X-Men 3: Last Stand" (which is actually not viewable on some older DVD players due to lack of processor power) and "Lord of the Rings Part I: Fellowship of the Rings" (which causes problems for up-converting).

Actually, I just like watching "Innocence" every now and then because I like the movie.

[techieMoe]

Some of my favorite DVDs for testing video playback are . . . "X-Men 3: Last Stand" ...and "Lord of the Rings Part I: Fellowship of the Rings" (which causes problems for up-converting).

Interesting. I have all 3 Lord of the Rings movies. What kinds of problems have you noticed it causing on upconverters? I might run through some scenes on Fellowship tonight and see how the new player fares.

[Cool01]

I do not actually remember. I think it was that you get big blocks or square pixels in areas of subtle shading like a large area of fairly clear sky or very even overcast. I do remember being told to watch the nazgul attack and the scene where the fireworks are set off.

I would like to see it again to confirm this, but my copy is packed away somewhere. Also, my current equipment might not have the problems anyway, so I might not be able to confirm it. Oh well, it is another movie I would like to watch again anyway.

[techieMoe]

I do not actually remember. I think it was that you get big blocks or square pixels in areas of subtle shading like a large area of fairly clear sky or very even overcast. I do remember being told to watch the nazgul attack and the scene where the fireworks are set off.

Hmm.. I went through a few scenes last night (didn't have time for a complete run-through of a 3 hour movie ) and didn't notice anything odd. I'll certainly take a look at the Nazghul attack and the fireworks at the beginning.

I believe the term for those square pixels you're talking about is "macroblocking" (link). I've run into it before on satellite TV and the occasional high-def disc like Discovery Atlas: Italy Revealed. In the former case, it was just a bad signal. In the latter, I think it was a badly burned disc. I haven't run into it yet on an upconverted DVD though. I'll keep my eye out.

[Cool01]

Yup. It was "macroblocking". There is a good chance that the problem will not show up in the latest equipment. It was fairly common when the first up-converting DVD players were coming out. I saw it fairly recently on a DVD copy of Bladerunner in the very last scene when Decker and the girl are running away. There is a shot of a large area of sky and there was a big blotchy dark area.

[techieMoe]

New Gadget: Sony Bravia XBR 46"

Last night the wife and I purchased a Sony KDL-46XBR4, 46-inch LCD. It supports 1080p and has 3 HDMI inputs. The picture quality is a solid step up from the Vizio L37 and VX32L we had before. Those sets were no slouch, but this one is noticeably better.

I played Cars on the Blu-Ray player last night to test out the new display, and I must say it's very nice. The size difference shows me fine details I couldn't see with a 32 or 37 inch set. It also supports 24fps output, which is (IMO) both a blessing and a curse.

1080/24p

1080/24p or 24 frames-per-second output is a mode available for newer HDTV sets and older high-end sets like this one. Basically, films are produced using larger negatives that run by at 24 frames a second, whereas television is produced using smaller negatives that go by 60 frames a second.

In the past, to make film stock run at normal speeds on home video (since all TVs ran at 60fps), tricks were employed that would reproduce every other frame 3 times and the frames in between 2 times. This is known as 3:2 pulldown. In general, this was good enough. The downside to this was that in long panning shots or fast motion shots, pieces of the image would blur or "judder" causing loss in image quality.

Replaying films at their native 24fps maintains a clear, sharp picture throughout. This can have some strange side effects to an eye used to the motion blur of 60fps.

For me, my first exposure to 1080/24p was last night when I hooked up my 1080p set to my 1080p BluRay player and watched a movie that was originally released on theatrical film stock.

I guess the best way to describe it is that motion looks almost too clear. It's kind of unnatural. If you're used to watching movies on DVD at home on a regular set with the usual amount of motion blur, your eyes tend to get used to it, and the effect of having a long pan or quick motion shot in full high-definition clarity the whole time is a little unsettling. The verdict is still out whether I'll keep this feature on.

Other Goodies

The remote is programmable for up to 4 devices, and it worked with the BDP-BX1 BluRay player without the need to enter any codes. I've programmed it successfully to control our cable box.

There are a few other bells and whistles to this set that I'll have to talk about as I discover them. There were quite a few logos emblazoned on the side of the box that I do not know anything about, such as x.v.Color and the Bravia Engine Pro.

The pile of cables I removed from our old TV and didn't need to plug back in was pretty significant. I'm not sure if I've described to you all the complexity of our previous setup, but it wasn't exactly simple.

Before, due to a timing issue with our cable box and our stereo receiver, I had the video from the cable box going to the TV using analog HD cables, the audio going through SPDIF optical, and the BluRay player plugged into the stereo through HDMI, which was then daisy-chained through a switcher to our TV. To do something like watch TV it took three remotes and three different input settings.

Also, due to limitations on the old TV, I had to pipe the sound for my Wii from the TV to the stereo using regular old headphone jacks. Not ideal, and it caused us to have to reset everything when I wanted to play games.

Now, I have the cable box and BluRay player hooked directly into the TV using HDMI and one cable (SPDIF optical) going from the TV to our stereo system. The added bonus to this is that anything going into the TV also has the benefit of being piped through the surround sound now, which includes the Wii.

Swapping between cable TV, Wii, and BluRay is a simple one-remote affair. I just have to change the TV input and I'm done. The stereo stays on the same input regardless and only has one cable going to it. I feel confident that my wife will no longer need to call me to explain to her how to watch TV.

[techieMoe]

Turns out the "no motion blur" problem wasn't from 1080/24p after all. My TV has an option (that was enabled by default) called MotionFlow. It does just that: causes motion to flow without blur. I can see where this would be useful in, say, a sports broadcast but it's just distracting in a movie. Thankfully it's easy to turn off.

I tooled around in the menus last night while reading the manual and discovered some interesting features. One is a light sensor that dynamically adjusts the brightness of the display depending on the amount of ambient light in the room. There's also a power saving mode, and some settings that will turn the TV on or off when I power the BluRay player up or down.