In This eNewsletter:
• Panel Envy by Thomas J. Norton
• Blu-ray Not Blowing Me Away by Shane Buettner
• DVDs of the Month by Thomas J. Norton

By Thomas J. Norton

Come the fall and y'all (my future as a poet may be in doubt) will be looking for that new television to carry you through the football/holiday/playoff/bowl game season. Not to mention all the DVDs, HD or otherwise, of the films in theaters now.

OK, it's not fall yet. You're still at the beach. But over the next few newsletters we plan to offer a useful battle plan for researching, shopping for, and installing the best video display for you. It's not too soon to get started.

Flat panel displays are certainly the hot ticket now; they're flying out the door so fast that it's sometimes even hard to get review samples of the best-selling designs. But are they really all that great?

Yes, and no. The good old CRT is rapidly passing into oblivion, but it remains the gold standard for many videophiles, including those who have abandoned it for more current and better supported technologies. A good CRT can't match the brightness or resolution of the new digital displays, takes up a lot of space, and weighs a ton, but so far nothing can touch it for the inky, rich blacks that make a picture pop.

Nevertheless, we've all been looking forward to TVs that you can hang on the wall for so long that the fact they're finally here seems like a Star Trek fantasy.

Among flat panels, LCDs provide the widest range of screen sizes. But they do tend to be more expensive than plasmas, particularly at 40-inches diagonal and larger. LCDs are also, in general, brighter than plasmas, less subject to permanent screen burn-in, and are claimed by some to draw less energy, though the latter remains a controversial issue.

The most significant difference between LCD and plasma is how well they reproduce deep blacks and shadow details. In general, plasmas produce richer blacks, though there are wide variations between different models. LCDs are more subject to a fog-like gray haze that becomes apparent when the scene becomes so dark that most of it falls below the residual black level of the display itself.

In the past LCDs have also been inferior to plasmas in their response to fast-moving images. The resulting smear is called image lag, and in marketing these sets the metric cited is "response time." LCDs can also be limited in their off-axis viewing quality. While both of these limitations remain compared to plasma, every generation of new LCDs seems to bring improvements in both characteristics.

LCDs also work better than plasmas at very high altitudes, where the latter tend to produce an audible buzz. This year's upcoming CEDIA Expo will be in mile-high Denver. It will be interesting to see how that works out.

The competition that's bringing down prices now could wield a devastating blow to new and exciting developments. SED technology, jointly developed by Canon and Toshiba, promises to bring the best qualities and features of both CRT and pixel based displays to the flat panel market, not to mention far lower power consumption. But its market introduction has been repeatedly delayed. While this may be for technical reasons, it will have the unfortunate effect of making the product less competitive in a market in which flat panel prices have dropped precipitously since SED prototypes were first shown to the public a couple of years ago. New technology is always more expensive at first. But will buyers pay a stiff premium for something new and potentially better when most of them simply shop for price and won't take the time, even today, to appreciate the variations in quality between different sets?

If there's a flat panel in your future, and you don't want to wait for the promise (and perhaps high price) of something like SED, your best bet is to look at as many LCD and plasma panel displays as you can. Even at the today's lower prices, a new flat panel will likely be the most expensive TV most of you have ever bought. Haunt the stores. Search out friends who have bought flat panels. Take notes. Read the reviews. Look at both standard definition material and high def. Don't settle for just a few demos of Ice Age 3: The Sun's Always Out. Insist on seeing a variety of both bright and dim images—everything from Eight Below to Dark City.

If you're a fan of fast action material like sports or video games, check carefully for image lag. But also be aware that the image burn-in issue with plasmas (not as critical as some fear, but still something to be careful about) makes them a dubious choice for video games. The games may seem to move fast, but in most of them significant portions of the image (score boxes, for example) hardly move at all.

Stay clear of any display with a vertical resolution lower than the HD minimum of 720p. A few flat panel displays are 1080p, and those that are tend to be far more expensive than lower resolution models. If you do pop for 1080p, make certain that it will accept not only 1080i at its inputs, but 1080p/60 as well. Even better is a display that will also accept 1080p/24.

You should also conform whether or not the flat panel you're considering includes tuners (high-def and standard def) and speakers. Some do not. If you plan on receiving your television over cable or satellite with an outboard set-top box, built-in tuners will be irrelevant. The same goes for speakers—if you will be using an outboard audio setup. But on-board speakers can be convenient when you just want to watch the news without cranking up the whole system.

Finally, the best advice I can give you about specifications is to ignore them. Manufacturers don't all use the same techniques to obtain them, so comparing them is next to useless.

Rear projection sets offer greater value per screen inch, and some performance benefits, over flat panel displays. But you can't hang them on the wall. Rear projection, however, is a story for next month.

By Shane Buettner

Sony's Blu-ray Disc format crept into stores in late June without much more of a bang than HD DVD did in April. The format "launched" with a single $1,000 player by Samsung(!) and a handful of less than stellar software titles. While I've been chomping at the bit to see Blu-ray, my first experiences with the Samsung player and the handful of discs I've seen have left me cold, and judging by the reaction I've read all around the web, I'm not alone.

Starting first with some specifics, on June 20th the Samsung BD-P1000 player hit stores, along with Blu-ray titles from Sony and MGM. Among them were a lone new release, Underworld Evolution, and demo warhorse Fifth Element, which is second only to T2 in the number of incarnations on home video. And let me add that the obligatory T2 release (from Lion's Gate) followed one week later on June 27th.

Let me say first that the opinions that follow aren't an indictment of the Blu-ray format, which I've had high hopes for since it was announced and still do. These are initial impressions based on looking at a handful of titles and watching them on a single player from Samsung, a manufacturer that has yet to really impress me with an optical disc player of any kind. I'm waiting and willing to be wowed, and sincerely hope that subsequent BD players and/or discs change my opinion thoroughly and completely.

My observations were made using the new Marantz VP-11S1 single chip 1080p DLP projector on an 80-inch Stewart Studiotek 130 screen for my main video display (review coming soon to www.ultimateAVmag.com).

With the caveats out of the way, the fact is that the HD imagery I'm seeing from BD isn't as god-awful bad as some have claimed, but isn't particularly good either. And so far it isn't even competitive with the outstanding image quality that I've seen from HD DVD. At best, the Blu-ray discs I've seen, which include Fifth Element, Hitch, House of Flying Daggersand Underworld Evolution, look about as good as HBO HD, and at worst simply look better than standard DVDs.

The HBO comparison is something of a backhanded compliment as it's widely known that HBO compresses its MPEG-2 based HD down to somewhere between 12-14Mbps. As a result, HBO's HD looks good, but is noticeably less crisp and sharp than the HD you'll see from HDNet Movies, Showtime, and even over-the-air HD broadcasts. The BDs I've seen so far, and again, for the record, watched only on the Samsung player, do not consistently reach the level of HBO's HD, often looking even softer, washed out and lacking in snap.

About every other HD DVD I see, on the other hand, looks far superior to even the best broadcast HD. While these aren't apples to apples comparisons with the same movies, the BDs I've seen are unequivocally softer and lacking in dimension and detail. The BD titles I've seen so far are all MPEG-2 encoded, which I'll have more on below, while all the HD DVDs I've seen are crunched with the newer and more efficient VC-1.

What am I seeing and why? My speculation centers on a series of decisions made by Blu-ray's backers, seemingly with the intent of getting Blu-ray software and hardware to market sooner rather than later. These choices not only impact how the players are equipped, but perhaps have a significant impact on what we're seeing in terms of image quality in these first titles. While this is clearly my own speculation, I don't think it's too much of stretch to say that BD is being rushed to market at least a little considering that the release of BD players from Sony and Pioneer has been pushed back steadily, with the current forecast pegged at September for the Pioneer and October for the Sony. The Samsung Blu-ray player, and those slated for release by both Sony and Pioneer, is not capable of decoding Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, or DTS-HD or DTS-HD Master Audio. And don't let some of the marketing lit fool you. Although DD+, TrueHD and the DTS-HD formats carry embedded backward compatible DD and DTS streams that can be decoded by the players, those are legacy signals that are not encoded at the higher resolutions and bitrates these new formats are capable of.

HDMI version 1.3 will be capable of carrying the new audio formats in their native, digital form, but that spec is only nearing completion now, and products incorporating HDMI 1.3 won't be available until late in the fall. Rather than wait on HDMI 1.3 or incorporating decoding capability for the new formats into BD players, Samsung went ahead with a player that doesn't decode any of the new formats, and Sony (though not Lion's Gate) has encoded its first BD titles with multichannel uncompressed PCM tracks at 16-bit/44kHz.

Although uncompressed PCM has the potential to sound far better than lossy compression schemes like current standard Dolby Digital and DTS, these tracks take up a lot of space on the disc. Over 4Mbps for a 5.1-channel stream of uncompressed 16/44, and then there are Dolby Digital tracks, often in English and French, on top of that. Further, unless you've got an AVR or pre-pro that's HDMI version 1.1 compatible, you can only hear the full resolution PCM from the BD-P1000's multichannel analog outputs.

In addition to choosing the bit hungry uncompressed PCM audio, Sony chose to encode the video for its first titles using tried and true MPEG-2 rather than the more efficient VC-1 and MPEG-4/AVC codecs now available. It seems possible that it was deemed faster and easier to get to market with MPEG-2 than ramp up with the new codecs. Sony argues, however, that MPEG-2 on BD would be using video bitrates in excess of 20Mbps, and that the new codecs offer no performance advantages at such high bitrates. I'm very suspicious that these first BD titles have bitrates this high since these discs don't look nearly as good as the MPEG-2 broadcast HD I watch every day that's encoded at around 20Mbps, but we should soon be able to check to see what is actually on the discs. There is no bit rate meter on the Samsung player, but we have confirmed that the Pioneer player will have one.

Then there's another factor, again seemingly related to the push to get into the market as close to HD DVD's debut as possible. Sony will not have replication capability for dual-layer Blu-ray Discs on line until late this year or early next year. All of the BD titles out so far are 25GB single-layer discs, sporting a full 20% lower disc capacity than the 30GB, dual-layer HD DVDs that are de rigeur for that format's releases. So much for Blu-ray's storage capacity advantage, at least for now.

So, there's plausible, if highly ironic evidence that BDs are challenged for video bitrate due to these decisions. This speculation is backed up further by the limited extra features on most of the first BDs. It's hard to imagine that Sony would choose such bare bones releases when loaded special editions sell so well on DVD if the bit bucket weren't already full. In comparison, most of the HD DVDs that have been released are loaded with all the features contained in typical dual-disc special edition DVDs of the same titles.

Another important variable is, of course, the player. How or if the Samsung BD-P1000 figures into all of this is the subject of a review at www.ultimateAVmag.com.

This isn't the kind of news I wanted to report on my first look at Blu-ray. I'm hoping that when I see players from Pioneer and Sony, or future discs, particularly of the 2-layer, 50GB variety, I'll be floored and will have to recant every one of these words. But a format only gets one chance to make a first impression, and so far Blu-ray isn't stating a compelling case as the next-gen format of choice.

A DVD Potpourri

As usual, summer isn't the best time for hot new DVD releases. With the studios trying desperately to draw you to the theater for their summer blockbusters in hopes of overcoming a prolonged box-office slump, they're in no hurry to feed the DVD kitty—even if it is (to mangle a metaphor) their biggest cash cow. And with the last of the big 2005 holiday releases already in video stores, there's not much exciting to report on.

I've been spending most of my recent viewing time immersed in HD DVD and Blu-ray titles. Basic Instinct 2 is coming out this week. Oh, Rapture! Try to contain yourself, even if it is being released simultaneously on standard DVD and Blu-ray. I've already had a look at the Blu-ray version, and it is one of the better looking of the first Blu-ray titles—perhaps the best. But to paraphrase Stereophile founder J. Gordon Holt, the better the transfer, the worse the film.

I'm not sure I want to sit through Syriana from beginning to end. And from all accounts you have to see it more than once to figure out what's happening. I know it's one of those "important" pictures that Hollywood has been trotting out in great profusion lately, to mixed box office results. I'm surprised the filmmakers didn't label it "inspired by true events," which really means, "we know oil is a cutthroat business, so let's take that literally and run with it." Many critics loved the film, despite its muddled narrative, and if you're into this sort of thing, you'll probably love it too. From what I've seen so far, I suspect it will make my teeth hurt. But not my eyes or ears. The sound is a lot more subtle than the narrative, but is effective nonetheless. On the video side I expected a roughly-produced affair with all the earmarks of a low-budget production—uneven photography, grain, and odd exposures. But I saw nothing of the sort. This is one of the many early HD DVDs that perform a special kind of magic, looking both superbly filmlike and at the same time cleaner and sharper than most theatrical film presentations.

I've also sampled a few of the more interesting recent conventional DVD releases for their technical quality. I'm a sucker for dogs (no remarks about my taste in movies, please), so Eight Below seemed like a natural. The critical reaction to this Disney release about sled dogs in Antarctica might have been mush, but I can't imagine any dog lover disliking it. It's also a great looking DVD transfer. The "glacier at noon," brightly lit photography of the sunlit landscapes at the bottom of the world will flatter almost any good video display, regardless of how well it handles blacks. The sound is never really spectacular, but it's still fine, including a superb Shawn Murphy recording of Mark Isham's evocative score.

It may be slow now, but I'm looking forward to some releases due in August and September. Most of these are season box sets of television shows, but what shows! The HBO miniseries Rome comes to DVD on August 15th. September 15th brings us season 2.0 Volume 2 (or 2.5—or whatever they decide to call it!) of Battlestar Galactica. And on October 2 we'll get season 2 of Lost. For those who can't wait that long, season 2 of the HBO series Carnivale comes out this week (July 18th).

So far there have been no announcements of TV shows on HD DVD or Blu-ray. But all of the above shows were broadcast in high definition (Galactica on its UniHD re-runs), and they deserve the same premium treatment on disc.

It's also been an interesting summer so far for movies in theaters, most of which will turn up on DVD before the end of the year (and, we hope, on HD DVD or Blu-ray as well!). Two of them, in particular, will be very interesting to see, technically speaking. Both Superman Returns and Click were shot on video using Panavision Genesis HD cameras (developed in cooperation with Sony), not on film. I saw Superman Returns in digital projection before I learned of this, and it looked like a very well photographed movie. It should look great on disc, particularly if they transfer it directly from the digital video files.

While I definitely enjoyed this latest Superman incarnation (and plan on seeing it again in IMAX 3D form) I did have reservations about it. You know there's a problem when the best part of your evening at the theater wasn't the main feature but rather the trailer for Spider-Man 3 (or S3, as it seems likely to be called). I'm surprised they had enough interesting clips to assemble such a great tease so early. But really, a trailer in summer 2006 for a summer 2007 release? I don't even have a 2007 calendar to mark yet.

But I do hear there are some great films coming out in 2008. By then, the HD-on-disc format war should be nearly over!