A Gadget Story, Part 2

[techieMoe]

This gadget story isn't over yet, because I'm still shopping around for the gadget in question. However I wanted to outline my experience in case any of you are planning on picking up any high-definition home electronics in the near future. Also, since this is an international forum, please remember I'm talking about US A/V standards and NTSC/ATSC rather than PAL.

If you hook up any of your existing A/V equipment to an HDTV, you're going to probably notice that the colors are going to look a bit different from your previous tube TV and that certain things (such as videogame consoles) look fuzzy. I noticed this with my Wii and my current bargain-basement Magnavox DVD player.

I really don't want to get into explaining the differences between 480i/480p, 720p, and 1080i/1080p resolutions for TV. Wikipedia is your friend. Suffice to say that just like computer monitors, HDTVs always give a better image when they're running at their native resolutions. For most HDTVs available these days that means 720p or 1080i.

The reason your game system or current DVD player look so fuzzy is the images are coming to the TV in a format not exactly optimal for it. 480i (480 lines, interlaced) was the standard for regular TVs, but it doesn't display the whole picture at once. This results in a fuzzy look on HDTVs because they have much higher refresh rates than tube TVs. Component cables for your game console will send the picture in 480p (480 lines, progressive scan), which although it's still square rather than widescreen, is still much clearer on an HDTV than regular TV signals.

Game Systems

There are a few things you can do to improve your picture. On the videogame front, you can look to see if your game console has component cables available for it. These resemble composite (red/yellow/white) cables, but they allow for more data to be transferred at once, giving you a sharper, non-interlaced picture.

Last I checked component cables are available for the Xbox, Xbox 360, Nintendo Gamecube and Nintendo Wii. They're also available for the PS3, but I wouldn't recommend them. For the PS3 the best picture will come from using HDMI cables instead. I'll discuss those in a moment. I noticed a very significant difference in picture quality on my Wii when using my purchased component cables rather than the included composite ones. I imagine the difference is just as much on the other systems. The Wii component cables cost me $24.99 from Nintendo's website.

The downside to using component cables on the Nintendo Wii is that a clearer picture is both a good and a bad thing. The Wii is not as highly powered as an Xbox 360 or a PS3, and when you clear up the picture, the edges of everything look a lot sharper. Unfortunately the Wii doesn't anti-alias very well which means edges that looked smooth on a regular TV look jagged in component 480p video. It's not enough to detract from my enjoyment of my games, but I thought it worth mentioning.

DVDs

For DVDs, you can buy a DVD player that will use component cables (they're usually labeled as progressive scan DVD players) and they will output 480p as well. Most of these players I've seen cost little more than regular DVD players, somewhere in the neighborhood of $50USD.

Although these progressive scan DVD players give a slightly better picture, they're not the best you can do with your regular DVDs on an HDTV.

Another option for DVDs is to buy an upscaling or upconverting DVD player. These are slightly more expensive (between $80-150USD) but they actually have video hardware in them that will essentially blow up your regular DVD's image and make it fit your HDTV's native resolution. They will also make the image fill your entire screen (if you have a widescreen HDTV). This is what I'm currently shopping for.

The catch for some of these upscaling/upconverting DVD players is that some do not offer the upscaling ability using the component cables that come in the box. Instead they include a plug in the back that receives an HDMI cable. You're probably thinking to yourself, "No problem. The extra cable can't cost that much, right? I'll just pick one up." Here is where you might be in for a shock.

The HDMI Conundrum

In the US, most major retailers (Best Buy, Circuit City, Radio Shack, Tweeter) carry ONE brand of HDMI cable: Monster Cable. The prices for a 4-foot (1.2m) cable ranges from $60-150USD depending on the retailer. This can easily meet or surpass the price of the device you're buying the cable for in the first place!

If you ask the employees of these fine establishments, almost all of them will expound the virtues of Monster Cables in ways meant to sway the unwary customer. In the case of places that give commission to their salesmen (Circuit City), sometimes these salesmen will outright lie to you to get you to buy their more expensive cable.

I found this out the hard way this weekend when I did some shopping and research for HDMI cables. Whenever I want to buy some new gadget I always try to do my homework in advance; I find as many consumer websites and technology articles as I can and make a short list of what I need to look for and where. When I researched HDMI cables, something surprised me. Out of the dozen or so sites I looked at (some of which had hundreds of personal testimonials) every single one gave the same conclusion about various brands and prices of HDMI cables: they're all functionally identical.

An HDMI cable, as the wikipedia article above illustrates, is a digital cable. There is no difference in the quality of transmission in terms of your video output; either the ones and zeroes get to your TV or they don't. You're not going to get a fuzzy HDTV picture if you get a cheap HDMI cable. This is a concern with analog cables, which are susceptible to all kinds of electromagnetic interference from the environment and even each other. This is why higher-end analog A/V cables are shielded. This is not a serious problem for HDMI.

I intend to buy an upscaling DVD player and a cheap HDMI cable (around $8.99USD) and test out the picture for myself within the next month or so, and I'll post my experiences on the forum if any of you are interested. I do not have the money to buy a Monster Cable myself and try it out too, but when hundreds of people say the exact same thing (it's not worth it), they're probably right. I hope this rather long post was informative to someone and I'm not just rattling off to the wind.

[techieMoe]

Well, I managed to pick up 2 HDMI cables (6 ft/1.8m) for $8.99USD a piece at Newegg.com. They came in, so naturally this spurred me on to actually buy my upconverting DVD player. I researched all the sites I could find for the best one at my price range and settled on a Panasonic DVD-S52S ($89.99USD). There's also an S52K, but the only difference is that the S is silver and the K is black.

I plugged in everything to my TV and my first impression was that I like having everything condensed down to the one plug, rather than Y/Pb/Pr/R/W or R/Y/W or S-video/R/W. It looked clean with just the power and the HDMI cable coming out of my DVD player.

The player defaulted to 480p resolution, which although better than 480i, isn't the top of what my TV can do. Throughout my tests, I swapped between 720p and 1080i, but honestly I couldn't tell the difference. I stuck with 1080i just for grins.

On to the tests. While researching upconverting DVD players, I read many stories about the various picture quality problems I can expect. The DVD player does, after all, have to essentially blow up a tiny picture and fill in the gaps. Some players are better than others, and some DVD transfers make the transition better than others.

I tested the following standard definition DVDs (all are widescreen unless indicated otherwise):

1. Star Wars: A New Hope (Remastered and Original Version)
2. The Fifth Element
3. X-Men 2
4. Family Guy Seasons 1&2 (aka Volume 1, regular 4:3 TV aspect)
5. Gladiator
6. Neon Genesis Evangelion Platinum Edition (regular 4:3 TV aspect)
7. Fooly Cooly OVA (regular 4:3 aspect)

The Panasonic DVD-S52 gives you a lot of configuration options, and I had to play around a bit in the menus to get exactly what I wanted. It defaults to the size of a regular TV (4:3) which will make even your widescreen movies look stretched until you set it to do widescreen (16:9).

The reviews I read told me to expect the best picture out of DVDs that were made more recently, since the equipment used would be of a higher quality and thus translate to a better DVD transfer. I found that to be absolutely true. X-Men 2 looked the best out of the bunch, with only a slight fuzziness in the blacks every now and then.

Family Guy, Fooly Cooly and Evangelion looked sharp and clear. The S52 has a special color setting for "animation" which works pretty well.

Gladiator looked good too, but not quite as clear as X-Men 2. The edges of some of the characters' faces got fuzzy from time to time.

The Fifth Element looked pretty good, except for the onscreen text. By this I mean the opening credits. There were strange little white borders around the words, almost like an animated halo. This was not an artifact of my cables; I tried both and got the same result. Apparently fonts are harder to blow up than actual movie images.

My next experiment will be with Superbit DVDs. Some of you might remember when these came out. They had silver packaging and claimed to be "better" than regular DVDs. Unfortunately at the time most people (myself included) only had a standard definition TV and DVD player, so the difference wasn't apparent.

My experiment will be to see if Superbit DVDs blow up better than standard DVDs using my upscaling player. To do a qualitative comparison I'm going to buy a Superbit version of a movie I already own, such as The Fifth Element (if I can find it). Stay tuned.

[techieMoe]

I purchased a Toshiba HD-A2 second-generation HD-DVD player this weekend. It finally reached the price point I was comfortable with ($299) and I was tired of waiting for an outcome on the "format war".

Of course, the first thing I did was buy a couple of HD-DVDs and watch them on my Vizio HDTV using my bargain HDMI cable. The movies I tried were Discovery Atlas: Italy Revealed and The Italian Job. The Discovery movie was actually filmed in 1080i high-definition, so there was no real extra encoding work necessary to pop it out.

The picture was beautiful, although I expect not everyone would notice a difference between this and say a decent quality DVD (480p) on a nice widescreen standard-definition TV.

The Tester Movies
The Italian Job was a theatrical release, re-encoded after the fact and it shows. The picture isn't quite as crisp or bright as the Discovery Channel special. It's still clearer than a DVD, however.

While watching Italy Revealed, I caught a few instances of pixel artifacts (basically it looks like interference you get with a satellite TV picture; little blocks and lines that don't refresh with the rest of the picture). Considering this is usually a problem caused by corrupt data, I blame the weakest link in my setup: my very cheap HDMI cables.

"What's this?" you may ask. "Has he admitted that perhaps not all HDMI cables are created equal and Monster might have it right?" Not at all. Cables will vary in data transmission quality, of course. Up until this weekend I had never piped as much data as an HD movie uses through those cables and they had performed beautifully with no artifacts. It's possible that only now when I'm pushing their bandwidth harder that they start to show some glitches.

Does that mean I'll be paying $150 for a 4-foot Monster cable? No. I may however investigate a slightly more expensive brand (circa $30USD) and test it on the specific scenes in Italy Revealed that caused the artifacting to see if there's a difference.

The HD-A2 Player
The player itself is much more compact and slick looking than the first generation player, which resembled an ancient VCR more than a top of the line piece of 2007 electronic equipment.

HD-DVD players (as described in the manual) have more in common with computers than standard DVD players. They have network cards, RAM, persistent memory, and require some time to boot up.

The boot time for my HD-A2 player was roughly 45 seconds, which any PC enthusiast will tell you is pretty decent for a computer. For an electronic device though, you're going to be tapping your foot wondering what's going on. We've been conditioned by instant-on electronics in recent years.

The good news is that once it's booted, it doesn't take any more time to read the disc and get playing your movie than a standard DVD player would. That's a feat considering the raw amounts of video and audio data that need to be processed off these 25GB discs.

The Rebate
Toshiba is sweetening the pot for those of us who buy an HD-DVD player before July 31st by offering a mail-order free 5 HD-DVD movies (with proof of purchase and UPC of course). The available choices are:

Apollo 13
Seabiscuit
The Chronicles of Riddick
Casablanca
Constantine
The Dukes of Hazzard
Four Brothers
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
The Rundown
Blazing Saddles
U2: Rattle and Hum
U-571
The Perfect Storm
We Were Soldiers

I've bolded my choices. I'll post back when I get them, which should be in a couple of months. I'm also looking forward to being able to buy The Matrix by itself, rather than the current boxed set. I never really liked the other two movies.

[harner]

Awesome, I learned a lot with this. I am in the market for an hdtv (42-46") and will use this as a reference! Oh, and Circuit City isn't on commission anymore, not in the past 3 years or so anyway. And the reason why cables are so expensive is because thats the retail price for them and it just so happens the market is good. I used to work at Best Buy, and the employee discount is cost + 5%. If you were a BBY employee, you could probably get the cable for ~$5.

The employee discount was the only benefit to working there. They don't have to be on commission to lie to you, they are brainwashed in the sales meetings to tell everyone what they learned, whether its right or wrong.



What kind of TV do you have, Moe?

[techieMoe]

Awesome, I learned a lot with this. I am in the market for an hdtv (42-46") and will use this as a reference!

Good deal! I was trying to be informative. I'm new to this whole HD thing so I thought it would be good to offer a perspective of a non audio-videophile.

Oh, and Circuit City isn't on commission anymore, not in the past 3 years or so anyway. And the reason why cables are so expensive is because thats the retail price for them and it just so happens the market is good. I used to work at Best Buy, and the employee discount is cost + 5%. If you were a BBY employee, you could probably get the cable for ~$5.

Well, I'm glad to hear they're not on commission anymore. It saddens me that some of the floor sales guys still act like their paycheck depends on me buying a bunch of stuff though.

Price plus 5% is a pretty darn good deal when you consider how much those cables are marked up. Good to know. I'll see if any of my little brother's friends are working at a Best Buy next time I need something.

What kind of TV do you have, Moe?

I have a Vizio 32inch, model VX32L HDTV. For more story on that, read A Gadget Story, Part 1. Haha.

[techieMoe]

Well, I did a little experimenting and I'm not so sure the artifacts I was seeing on the Discovery Atlas: Italy disc were caused by my cables after all. I've watched several HD and standard DVDs on the player and noticed no such image problems.

I took the player home and hooked it up to my TV (rather than my girlfriend's) and used my HDMI cable (same brand as my girlfriend's). I played the Discovery disc and saw the same image issues in the same spot.

However I've watched The Italian Job (HD-DVD) and Kung Fu Hustle (standard DVD) on my new player as well. Neither showed any image issues. My next experiment will be to play something that was recorded in hi-definition (similar to the Discovery movie), since my hypothesis is that perhaps the movie-to-HD-DVD conversion resulted in less data being transferred over my cables.

I've also read here that some people have had issues with the Discovery Atlas series on their HD-DVD players, so it's not out of the question that the disc itself may have problems. I may rent another copy of my same disc to see if I just got a bad batch.

I realize that this may or may not be interesting to the rest of you, but I enjoy solving little mysteries like this. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

[techieMoe]

I've taken most of this thread and written an article around it on my site, which can be found here:

Things I've learned about HD-DVD

In case you aren't up to reading it, the good news is I've pretty well answered the question of whether the image issues on Italy Revealed were due to the disc itself or my setup.

After watching the entire first disc of the BBC's Planet Earth, I noticed no image problems whatsoever, which leads me to believe that the problem was the disc itself. My suspicion that $8.99 HDMI cables were of sufficient quality has been confirmed.

[Oxygen]

So what's wrong with Scart?

[techieMoe]

So what's wrong with Scart?

Umm... pardon?

::EDIT:: Had to look that one up. You don't see much SCART on this side of the pond. For my other USA brethren, it's apparently a French video connector. New one on me.

SCART - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[techieMoe]

Well, my five free HD DVDs came in the mail today. They are the real deal, retail cases, shrinkwrapped and all. A couple of them had some minor damage to the case (the little spoke that holds the disc in had some prongs broken off, no big deal really).

If I take into account the street value of these movies (none of them sell for less than $20USD and most sell for $25) the cost of my player drops from $300USD to $175USD, which is a significant difference.

I've watched only Blazing Saddles so far but the picture quality is excellent. I look forward to watching more later in the week. The rebate from Toshiba is real, although they really meant to the letter when they estimated 8 to 10 weeks. Today was 8 weeks nearly to the day. Oh well. Better now than never.