The Perfect Vision
Pioneer BDP-94HD Additional Information
24fps | BD+ Problems | Additional Features | Test Discs
What's the Deal with 24fps?
When you go to your local googolplex, you see the movie as it was meant to be seen—projected onto the screen at 24 frames per second, with each frame repeated two or three times. However, when you watch a movie at home, you typically see it displayed at 60fps, with each frame repeated three or two times alternately. This is known as “3:2 pulldown.”
Why the difference? Video is based on a frame rate of 30fps, which is easily doubled, so most TVs and video sources use 30 and 60fps. As a result, movies on HD DVD and Blu-ray must be converted from 24 to 60fps, a process that can make any motion on the screen look a bit jerky.
Why not just show movies at 24fps—or, to be more precise, 48 or 72fps, doubling or tripling each frame—on home theater systems? Because most video source devices can’t send signals at 24fps, and many TVs can’t accept signals at 24fps. Even the growing number of TVs that can accept 24fps usually display them at 60fps, applying 3:2 pulldown and defeating the purpose of 24fps. So much for that idea.
Not so fast—Pioneer is among the few, er, pioneering companies to offer TVs that can accept 24fps signals and display them at 72fps, repeating each frame three times, just like in commercial cinemas. It’s only natural, then, that the BDP-94HD can send 24fps signals. Of course, it can also send signals at 60fps for those displays that can’t accept 24fps.
BD+ Problems
Some Blu-ray titles are starting to appear with a new layer of copy protection called BD+, and I’ve been hearing that these discs are wreaking havoc on many players, loading very slowly and causing crashes, though some blame BD-J, Blu-ray’s implementation of Java. Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer is one such title, and sure enough, it took two and a half minutes from closing the disc drawer to the FBI warning, and another 30 seconds to see the first trailer. However, it didn’t crash the player and seemed to work normally from that point forward. I suspect a firmware update would improve the situation, though I didn’t have time to do it for this review.
Additional Features
Aside from the normal A/V outputs, the Pioneer also sports an Ethernet port, allowing you to connect it to a home network. You might think this allows the firmware to be updated online, but alas, it isn’t so. (To update the firmware, you must download the update from the Web, burn it to DVD, and insert the disc in the player. The newer BDP-95FD’s firmware can be updated via Ethernet.) The BDP-94HD is compatible with Windows Media Connect and DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) standards, which means you can browse and access video, music, and photos stored on any Windows XP computer or DLNA-certified file server on the network. It also implements Microsoft’s PlaysForSure, which assures that compatible content purchased online will play without problems.
The remote is reasonably well organized with glow-in-the-dark buttons, though it’s a bit cluttered. Also, the menu buttons around the 4-way cursor cluster are a little confusing—which one do I use for what? I finally figured it out, but it’s somewhat non-intuitive. (Why do most Blu-ray players have separate buttons for the disc menu when it’s stopped and when it’s playing?) Also present are a few basic controls for the TV.
The Display button is especially cool—it displays various information, including the bit rate at which data is coming off the disc. This is a pretty geeky thing, but I really like it. (I admit I’m a geek and proud of it!)
One control I heartily applaud is a dedicated output-resolution rocker that lets you change the resolution on the fly while a disc is playing. You can set it to a fixed resolution, or let the player output whatever resolution is on the disc. Another setting causes the player to output the TV’s optimum resolution, which the TV communicates back to the player via HDMI. On the downside, this control can’t be used to set 24fps operation; that control is available only in the menu.
Speaking of the menu, it’s one of my favorites—exceedingly well-designed and intuitive. You can see three levels at once, which is wonderful. Even better is the availability of picture presets and three user memories that let you store your own picture settings; these presets and memories can be accessed with a dedicated button on the remote, which is really great. I wish more player manufacturers would include picture controls so that the player could be tweaked for the TV rather than the other way around.
Test Discs
Staring with the HQV Benchmark Blu-ray disc with a 1080p/60 output, both the video and film resolution loss tests showed lots of flickering in the high-frequency vertical bursts, but none at 1080i/60, indicating that the player’s processor couldn’t deinterlace these patterns well. Jaggies were very mild at 1080p/60 and non-existent at 1080i.
With the HQV Benchmark DVD, the player displayed it in a 4:3 window, even though it was set for a 16:9 TV. Setting the TV Aspect Ratio to 4:3 didn’t help, as it did with the Toshiba HD-A35, but switching the 4:3 Video Out setting from Normal to Full did the trick. Jaggies were mild at both 1080i and 1080p/60. The player never locked onto 3:2 pulldown at 1080p/60; 1080i was somewhat better, but it was very slow to work. I suspect the player is doing something in the upconversion from 480i to 1080i or 1080p that interferes with 3:2 pulldown correction.
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