EXCLUSIVE: Early Samsung Blu-ray Players Ship with Chip Mistake
July 20th, 2006 — By editorA noise-reduction chip mars Samsung’s Blu-ray player’s premiere for early adopters. On picture quality: “This was not dazzling.”
by Scott Wilkinson, The Perfect Vision
July 18 - I’ve been reviewing some Blu-ray titles sent from Sony on Samsung’s BD-P1000, but, like many of the early adopters out there, I’ve been less than impressed.
Sony arranged to have some titles sent to me for the review, and as I went through them, I was surprised at how soft they looked compared with the best HD DVDs I’ve seen. The images simply didn’t “pop;” there was no “wow” factor as there was with HD DVD. I was left with the same impression watching them on a Samsung HL-S5687W 56-inch 1080p DLP RPTV and a Samsung SP-H710AE 720p DLP front projector.
What was going on here? I’ve seen a dozen dazzling Blu-ray demos over the past two years: This was not dazzling. “The Fifth Element,” “Terminator 2,” “House of Flying Daggers,” “Memento,” “Lord of War,” “Crash,” “UltraViolet;” all looked not much better than upconverted DVD. Not only that, “The Fifth Element” had obvious scratches and dirt from using a substandard print in the mastering process.
Don Eklund, executive vice president of advanced technologies at Sony Pictures, noticed that the player’s image did not match the quality of the master tapes from which the Blu-ray titles were encoded. He contacted Samsung, whose engineers determined that the noise-reduction circuit in the player’s Genesis scaler chip was enabled, causing the picture to soften significantly.
According to Jim Sanduski, senior vice president of marketing for Samsung’s Audio and Video Products Group, “Samsung is currently working to revise the default settings on the noise-reduction circuit in the Genesis scaler chip to sharpen the picture. All future Samsung BD-P1000 production will have this revision and we are working to develop a firmware update for existing product.”
An easy fix, but still…
To see the difference for myself, I went to Sony Pictures, where Eklund had set up and calibrated three identical displays (the Samsung LN-S4095D 40-inch 1080p LCD flat panel) driven by an unmodified BD-P1000, a modified player (with the noise reduction turned off), and the master tape from which the Blu-ray disc being played had been encoded.
We looked at two titles, “Memento” and “50 First Dates,” and sure enough, the modified player looked much closer to the master tape and far better than the unmodified player. Disabling the Genesis chip’s noise reduction improved sharpness significantly and reduced the occasional temporal artifacts that were sometimes evident in dark, solid backgrounds on the unmodified player. Also, it allowed the film grain - an intentional form of noise - to become more evident.
To get some sense of the difference between HD DVD and Blu-ray, video guru Joe Kane brought his Toshiba HD-XA1 HD DVD player over to Grayscale Studio, The Perfect Vision’s new video lab. We connected it and the Samsung BD-P1000 to a Gefen HDMI switcher whose output was sent to a Samsung SP-H710AE 720p DLP projector (review in Issue 70 of TPV) firing onto a Stewart GrayHawk RS screen. Granted, it’s not a 1080p display, but its characteristics are well know to both of us, so we could easily see any difference between the two players, which were set to output 1080i. (The Toshiba’s 720p output is poor, so we let the projector do the deinterlacing and scaling.)
We started with HD DVDs, including clips from “Blazing Saddles”, “Apollo 13″, and “Phantom of the Opera”. All were spectacular, sharp as a razor with detail to spare. Then we switched over to Blu-ray, playing clips from “The Fifth Element” and “Terminator 2.” Aside from “The Fifth Element”’s obvious dirt and scratches, both titles looked decidedly soft compared to the HD DVDs. The THX logo on “T2″ looked sharper than the movie, which had some significant edge-enhancement as well.
Give Samsung’s player another shot
Unfortunately, I cannot yet draw any definitive conclusions about the Samsung BD-P1000’s video performance. I was able to spend only an hour with a player in which the Genesis noise reduction was disabled, and it did look markedly better than a stock player on the same model of display. But I’ll need to spend more time with one on my own to know for sure how much improvement that modification represents.
It’s not that the images from the original player looked bad; to an untrained eye without direct comparison, they would probably look pretty good. Still, when I showed some clips to a friend without a trained eye, he said, “So, what exactly is high-definition about this?” That just about says it all.
I believe that Blu-ray has the potential to look every bit as good as HD DVD, perhaps even a little better for a number of technical reasons. And it’s not uncommon to encounter some bumps in the launch of any new format. Once Samsung fixes the noise-reduction problem, I have every confidence that Blu-ray will look fabulous.
Discuss this story in the AVguide Forum!
Sony’s explination does not explain why people are seeing the same soft picture with their VAIO player though?
Comment by Glenn July 18th, 2006 @ 10:48 pmIf this is true…
Why do Blu-ray titles look so soft on my VAIO? I see little difference between Blu-ray on the Samsung and my VAIO. Both produce a significantly softer picture than my HD-DVD player on available titles.
Comment by Ken F July 19th, 2006 @ 5:51 amTo Editor: First, thanks for the excellent discovery. There are many people out there who are dissapointed with their Samsung… This is great news.
Comment by jim July 19th, 2006 @ 12:22 pmSecond, In your article, while comparing the Samsung to the Toshiba, its hard to tell if you are using your old Samsung or the newly modified one?????
Third, please hurry back with info on fixing this problem and more info on picture quality!!!
Thanks…
When I watched Blu-ray titles, in addition to softness of the picture (compared to HD DVD) I noticed a lot of compression artifacts which to me were even more annoying than softness: washed-out colors, unnatural skin-tones, dull, flat-looking picture, color-bending, loss of detail on moving objects and very noticeable mosquito noise. In comparison, most HD DVD titles don’t have these artifacts, or at least they are much less noticeable. I suspect that some of them are caused not by the player, but are due to the fact that current Blu-ray titles use less advanced compression (MPEG-2 vs. VC-1) on a smaller disc (25GB vs. 30GB) and as a result have to use much heavier compression.
I would be interested to know if the author observed compression artifacts with the modified player?
Comment by Ilya July 19th, 2006 @ 3:08 pmScott,
Thank you so much! I was excited to be an early adopter of Blu-Ray after having OTA and DirecTV HD for years now using a Toshiba CRT.
The picture on numerous movies was great, but I was more impressed by the uncompressed PCM soundtracks. Now I understand my lack of enthusiasm for the image. I continued to buy movies thinking it must be their fault.
Now I understand that I should have trusted my vision and questioned this from the beginning. (Going now to find my receipt to be sure I registered this BD-P1000 with Samsung — I definitely want, and expected, more.)
John
Comment by John July 19th, 2006 @ 3:48 pmI’ve not seen Blu-ray from a Vaio computer. If the picture quality is as soft as it is on the Samsung player, there’s more going on than the Samsung’s noise-reduction circuit (unless the Vaio uses the same chip!). I’ll look into that. Were you looking at the computer’s monitor or a larger home-theater display?
Most of my experience with the Toshiba player is with the original version (noise-reduction circuit enabled). I only had about an hour to look at one with the circuit disabled. I hope to get a modified player soon, and I will report my findings at that time.
As for compression artifacts, I didn’t think they were that bad on the original player. I did see what looked like edge-enhancement on some titles (T2, for example), which I thought was a mastering issue, not a player issue. Of course, compression artifacts (mosquito noise, macroblocking, etc.) arise from the compresssion process, and the player’s processor is responsible for reducing them as much as possible. I did notice that temporal artifacts (noise that arises from analyzing multiple frames) in flat, dark backgrounds were somewhat reduced when viewed from the modified player.
I did not see the noise from HDMI that many others are reporting from the original player. My biggest objection remains the softness of the image.
I suggest we take this over to the Forum (forums.avguide.com/viewtopic.php?t=356), where I’ll be happy to continue the discussion.
Thanks for all your input!
Scott Wilkinson
Comment by Scott Wilkinson July 19th, 2006 @ 8:35 pmVideo Editor
The Perfect Vision
I was interested in buying a HD type dvd player, but I have a bitter taste in my mouth after buying two expensive 5.1 dvd players only to see the disc manufacturers walk away from both (as an early adopter I had to buy 2 machines in order to play both formats-sound familiar).
I particularly was interested in the Samsung player due to it’s versatility. I understood it could output 1080p which would match my Sceptre 37″ LCD TV…But, thanks to this review I’ll once again raise my skepticism and pass on new technology. I’ve been burned enough.
Why can’t companies just work together to bring one “mature to the point it actually works” technology instead of marketing competing half-baked formats (there should be a universal player that works with 99.9% of discs and outputs in 1080p since this will be the de-facto resolution soon).
I’m sick of stuff that is overpriced, doesn’t work half the time and requires you to up-grade constantly due to failure and obsolesence. Thanks for giving me rant space. Any manufacturers listenig…Sony?
Comment by John July 20th, 2006 @ 2:37 amThe reviews and experiences presented here are very disappointing. This so much reminds me of the old Beta and VHS foolishness, and then on to SACD and DVD Audio crap.There really is no need for any of this… does the word “greed” come to anybody’s mind. I AM NOT going to have anything to do with buying into this new technology until the companies get their act together… and SONY, you should be ashamed, the consumer deserves better. I for one can do without HD until there is a high degree of compatability for all the video and audio formats, and the technology matures. For now, the best speakers and a DVD will be very enjoyable… mature and relatively inexpensive, plus I know I am getting very good value for my money.
Comment by Randy Nugent July 21st, 2006 @ 8:09 am