Crappy Blu-ray Video Quality Due To Faulty Chip

[Ian]

I'm sure you've seen a number of editorials and articles about Blu-ray video quality and how HD DVD is superior. According to AVGuide.com, its because the Genesis scaler chip in the Samsung BD-P1000 shipped with noise-reduction circuit enabled. Doh!

http://www.avguide.com/news/2006/07/20/ ... p-mistake/

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.”

I have a lot of respect for this guy. Instead of just writing off Blu-ray, he did a little work and found out what the problem was. I can't say as much for half the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD articles I've read over the past few weeks. I swear, half of these guys must be on HD DVD's payroll.

[dolphinius_rex]

I've actually had the pleasure of watching the 5th Element on BluRay and Upscaled DVD both on the Samsung BluRay player (and an HDTV of course), and I have to say the quality difference was noticable already... I wasn't SUPER impressed, but if they can make it even better I'll be very happy

[oslik3]

this is so lame/strange

what, samsung engeneers did not see the sharpness problem during their development/testing process ? what else were they looking at , if not at the picture ? it's not like it's a hidden bug that suddenly appeared. They were watching the picture all along and were OK with it. And now they suddenly say that they can make it better by simply turning some adjustment knobs.

[Ian]

I'm guessing the engineers were using test units that didn't have it enabled. Its still no excuse though. They should have checked the players coming out of the factory.

[oslik3]

maybe Sony Pictures executive (from the article) compared picture from Samsung player to a picture from Sony pre-production player he somehow had access to... ... and this way he could easily see the problem...

[Dartman]

They probably freaked when over half or more of the samsungs were returned to Best Buy and other retailers. It got so bad BB started charging a 14% restocking fee on the sanmsung only as far as I have read.
I hope that's all there is to it and I also hope the multi formats come about soon for better prices.
Sony's bet the farm on this so they aren't going to loose without a fight.

[elliothg]

Very Good.