Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer? - Page 5

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

Oh boy..

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

That same thought came across my mind as well. To me it would seem logical to build a good cheap BD player to kind of nudge Sony into lower prices for BD. I guess it's that agony of defeat thing that's remains a bitter taste in your mouth.

We shall see when the tech arrives. Eventhough it seems like a plausible approach for Toshiba, what price range will this be in. I think if it's over 150.00 it's difficult to sell (I have to admit) "scaled to HD" in comparison to selling HD.

But if does a really good job scaling video to look close to HD and incorporate those interactive menus seen on HD-DVD and BD, well it might be hard to pass up. I have to admit if BD came down in price significantly let's say below 200.00 it would be hard to sell to us anyway. The masses however is a different story.

Gimmicks and gadgets can capture the attention of the mass consumers and if cheap enought and marketed well meaning "now enjoy you current collection in HD quality" it can do well.

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

Quick question for current Blu-ray player owners:

How IS the upscaling of SDVDs with your BD player?

I am waiting for the new Sony to make my first BD player purchase -- the handful of as-yet-unplayed BD titles I have already purchased mock me on a daily basis until then -- but I recall hearing how impressively the Toshiba HD-DVD player upscaled standard discs. Was curious how Blu players stacked up in that department.

If Blu-ray players only do a so-so upscaling job on standard discs AND Toshiba actually does the seemingly impossible with this allegedly new upscaling technology, then I would have both a BD player AND a Toshiba upscaler in my HT.

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

Toshiba is not aiming this at bluray owners. This is clearly aimed at the average person that has not bought into bluray. As to whether it can be done maybe we should wait and see. Again competition is never unhealthy.

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

You probably find more info from some other thread, but at least PS3 has very good upscaling. But of course, even the best upscaling looks "like SD DVD" at the end of the day..

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

Is there any point to this response?

If you disagree, then go ahead and make an argument.

Like 1080p?

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

Mr. Yoo, we kinda "argued", "debated" and "discussed" on these similar issues ("HD will be a niche market", "SD DVD still rulez", "Upscaled DVD is good enough", "downloading will be the future", "Joe 6-pack won´t buy HD", etc etc etc) during the format war and soon after that in the "doomsday"-threads.. I have done too many "arguments" already. You probably missed those 100 threads back in the days?

This thing seems to go in cycles. I guess now when the HD DVD is gone, we still need to go through the "super-upscaling Toshiba" vs Blu-ray (or was it "SD DVD is good enough vs Blu-ray", I got confused).

No matter, Blu-ray will prevail. As always.

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

It's hard to believe that in the 21st century some people are trying to champion up-scaled dvd.

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

As to whether what can be done? Make a DVD look as good as HD content on BD? AFAIAC, it can't be done. Toshiba's claim to be able to do so is horse shit, pure and simple. They should be ashamed to be even hinting that it is possible.

There is more to a high definition picture than the number of lines that can be displayed. The biggest issue is bandwidth. DVD doesn't have the bandwidth needed to carry the amounts of data required to reach the kind of picture detail on your average HD movie. Toshiba knows that. If they didn't they wouldn't have tried to market their own HD DVD system in the first place.

If Toshiba actually believed that SD DVD was capable of equalling the quality of BD, they wouldn't have bothered pouring hundreds of millions of research and advertising dollars into developing their own HD system. For them to now claim that they can make SD DVD look like HD is just so much false advertising, and nothing but a cheap stunt to try to derail the adoption of true HD media on disc.

Toshiba's interpolation chip has to do more than upscale the picture in order to match the PQ of BD. Their chip would have to either create or extract detail from the DVD. If it creates detail then that detail is only an approximation of the detail that would be available on a true HD master. It would be adding detail that wasn't in the original master. It would be nothing but DNR in reverse. Maybe they could call it DNI: Digital Noise Injection.

If it extracts detail then Toshiba's claims are bull shit, because the detail required to achieve a true BD/HD DVD quality picture is non-existent on a standard DVD.


I'm curious. Do you actually own a high definition player of any kind?

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

I am still waiting for a VHS upscaler. I have some VHS movies I want to watch in 1080P.

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

Eh, not really buying into this. Mostly because my Toshiba HD-A2 already does an amazing job of upscaling my existing DVD collection, so much so that it takes a good HD-DVD or Blu-ray transfer to create enough of a difference between the two to justify the added cost of the Blu-ray player I just bought.

Since the two can be so close, I just can't see that there is anyplace in between for Toshiba's new tech to comfortably fit. Joe 6 Pack would just be better off buying one of the (many) Toshiba HD-DVD players (or any good upscaler) currently on the market.

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

How can anyone believe that missing detail can simply be conjured up out of thin air? Photoshoppers, try this: take a 1920x1080 still photo with true 32-bit color. Change the image size to 640x480, and squash the color space to 12 bits. While you are at it, save the image with a 4:1 compression ratio.

Now open up your new file, and change the image size to 1920x1080 and set the color space to 32 bits.

Compare, critically, the unchanged photo to the newly mangled one. If you think the two are comparable, then I think you need a new pair of glasses!


C'mon, folks. The claims made are false, pure and simple. The average braindead citizen might not realize they are being hornswoggled if they have never seen real hi-def in the same way that a certain audio manufacturer has pulled a million yards of wool over the ears of unsupecting consumers. I admit that upscaled DVD looks pretty good, but it sure does not look as good as HiDef - the devil is in the details: blades of grass, whiskers, striped ties, and so on.

Enough from me, I've told you the truth and you can rant against it all you like. btw: we really did land on the Moon.

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

If by that you mean HD-DVD or BluRay, then no.

I have been watching OTA HDTV for a few years now, so I am not a stranger to HD content. Don't get me wrong -- HD is noticeably better looking than SD DVD (IMO, 70%-80% of that is the color resolution). I just think that 1080p lines of resolution itself is overkill for all but a handful of consumers, yet there is a consensus that "no 1080p, no HD." I'm just pointing out that that is not true.

Actually, I missed the whole thing

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

I have yet to watch any OTA HD content that rivals the quality of a BD or HD-DVD disc. It always suffers to some extent from compression and delivery artifacts.

1080p may not be a huge improvement over 720p for the average person on most sets, but it certainly isn't a "gimmick."

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

Hanson, Are you getting your HD truly over the air, or via cable/satellite?

it is not fair to say that Blu-ray HD is the same as the HD on Sat or Cable. The amount of compression I get on my cable HD is very bad. I have no doubt that Toshiba might be able to make a DVD look as good as my HD on cable.

The HD via Blu-ray is much, much better than HD over cable.

I don't think they will ever be able to get the Dvds to look like Blu-Ray quality HD.

I have never seen actual over the air HD so I don't know what it looks like. If your local channels use sub-channels then you are not getting the full HD quality either.

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

I watch OTA, and the CBS station has no subchannels (the FOX station has only one, a compressed SD feed of what used to be WWOR that so bad it's worse than analog cable -- way, way worse).

I recently added a HD digital cable into the mix, but I've never done any A/B testing. I haven't noticed that the cable HD is appreciably worse than OTA, but it's much easier to record OTA, so I actually don't watch a lot of the cable HD feed (it is TV doldrums time, after all).

If this Tosh player can make a DVD look like cable HD, I'll reserve one at Best Buy right now!

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

I'm Chinese, and no, we haven't -- not anymore than what current upconversion DVD players can do for DVD. Sure, the substitutes can taste good, but you have to have pretty poor taste buds (or simply never much of a meat eater) to confuse the substitutes for the real thing.


I agree there though I really doubt they can pull all that much more out of the heavily compressed MPEG2 stream as the source. If the source video stream is good quality, lossless, full res 480p, then you might be right. But that's not the case w/ DVD. Also, not quite that many DVD titles have fully utilized the format's potential either, so that makes it more difficult for such tech to work well across the board. In the end, even if it works great for the best DVDs out there, it probably will still be lacking for a large majority of lower quality DVDs.

Of course, you're probably right that many folks will not care about the diff between Blu-ray and this tech, if this thing pans out. OTOH, like others point out, most of those folks probably also won't care about this tech either. They're probably satisfied enough w/ any old upconversion, including the one native to their display device.

This is all just a lot of speculation at this point. The only certainty we have right now is that Blu-ray is here (and no longer hindered by a HDM format war) and offers us very good HD quality (when done right). You're free to wait for the next step forward in DVD upconversion, if that ever really comes about. For myself, if I'm gonna buy a new title, I'd much rather go for the Blu-ray at this point. If DVD upconversion does improve to become "good enough" for me, I'll still have my existing DVD collection around to make use of that -- I'm not in a big hurry to hock off my entire collection just because I started spending $ on Blu-ray.

The rest is just gonna be a lot of back-and-forth speculation...

_Man_

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

I dunno -- to take this analogy further, they gave meat substitutes to a bunch of chefs on Hell's Kitchen. With the blindfold and without any expectation, none of them realized they were eating procssed soy protein. I guess if you know going in that it's upconverted SD, you'll find every flaw, but if you didn't know better, it's possible you'd wouldn't be able to tell at first glance.

Now, it really wouldn't be noticable if you watched it blindfolded.

I've tried the fake duck, and if I didn't know it was fake duck going in, I don't know if I would have known it was fake duck, you know?

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

This is not true at all. E.g. I have 1080p LCD (like many others have 1080p LCD, Plasma, projector, etc) and that "1080p" Blu-ray (well, MOST of them are film based 1080p/24fps) fits with my TV like a glove. And looks great. The difference between Blu-ray and SD DVD is *clearly* there.

Sure, we can debate about "720p vs 1080p", "1080i vs 1080p" etc, but I´m just glad that 1080p was the "choice" that was made, when it comes to Blu-ray. Just like I was glad that the format with "max 50gb" won the war..

Days of the "good enough" are over ("SD DVD is good enough", "30gb is good enough", "super-upscaling is good enough" etc). We need quality 1080p in Blu-ray (HDTV is another subject, though). Take no substitute.

Of course, SD DVD lives on, so you can always stick to that. It still looks pretty good in its own way (e.g. I still watch SD DVDs).


Consider yourself as one of the lucky ones. 2 years full of bitter stuff (and some cheap prices, though...).

It´s also true, that many of these issues has been talked (almost) to death already. This "upscaled Toshiba" might be just one "short extension" from the tree that we can humorously call "format war"-tree.

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

This explains alot. My friend, you need to get a Blu-ray player and enjoy the difference.

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

Hmmm... I wonder who these so-called "chefs" are though. I suppose it's very possible that these chefs just aren't well acquainted w/ real Chinese food to notice the diff -- they might be too busy experiencing other aspects of the food to notice -- which might not be too different than asking the average person w/ good eyesight what they think about a decent (but still artifact-full, color/resolution limited) SD digital cable show. Most people should be able to tell that images can look much better than SD digital cable (just from their daily real life experiences), but they might be too busy enjoying other aspects of the images to worry about certain PQ issues that we care about here -- at least not unless you show them something much better.


That's probably true about finding *all* the flaws. However, I don't think you need to know it's fake (or just upconverted SD) to be able to notice a diff. Yes, I agree knowing more will help inform one's critical viewing and reveal more flaws, but even w/out that, one can still notice certain flaws when one is given something else to compare to. Of course, noticing a diff and acting on it are two different things -- and that's where we wonder whether all that many average consumers will ever adopt Blu-ray and other higher fidelity/quality products.


I don't doubt that may be the case for *you* (and many others). But for those of us who know what duck tastes like, the substitutes just don't taste the same just as everything else does not really taste like chicken either.

_Man_

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

Hanson, you aren't trying to fool us into thinking that the chefs on Hell's Kitchen have a clue, are you?

You forget -- I actually watch that show!

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

I find it amazing that we are even debating the "advantages" of Toshiba's attempt to resurrect red-laser based HD.

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

Matt did pretty good, and he's insane!

I'd love to see a bunch of foodies take blindfold tests like that. I think we'd be surprised at the results -- they'd probably hit about the same as the HK contestants. Unless, of course, the producers only pick the contestants with poor flavor/texture recognition (smoking is a must!).

All I can say is, I have trained myself to look with my eyes and not with my brain. It saves me a ton of money!

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

This, in my opinion, is key. I think interpolation of single frames has reached a plateau, so I wouldn't expect any (significant) further improvement there. But working from multiple source frames, 'mining' them for subtle differences and integrating those differences to make 'really good' guesses at what new pixels to create COULD be a game-changer. But I think it's really important to remember, like you mentioned, that getting ANY video output from an MPEG-2 stream already requires something along these lines.

The real question is, how much headroom exists? If you throw enough processing horsepower at a big enough buffer full of frames, and your algorithms are smart enough...

I would never position this as competitive with Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, but I definitely think there is merit to improving upscaling of standard DVDs (I have plenty that I don't want to, or CAN'T, replace on HD/Blu).

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

If you've only watched OTA, you don't know what real HD is capable of.
It isn't so much the compression. I have FIOS and all but the worst Blu-rays look a hell of a lot better than any HD channel, at least when you're talking film content because they DNR broadcast material all to hell. The detail is dramatically reduced in this image and you end up with something in between a DVD and what HD should be. Sometimes the DVD might actually look more detailed depending on how much DNR is applied to each source.

That, and many channels are only 720p. Even on a 38" CRT HDTV, there's a noticeable difference in the resolutions.

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

In my country, we don´t really have HDTV yet (we have some "premium pay"/satellite HD television channels available, though). What we generally have is a "digital TV" with PAL system (576). Now the resolution in paper is equal to SD DVDs (PAL), but our TV looks more or less s**t (well, at least very mediocre) compared to DVD-movies. It´s just so compressed vs DVD.

So e.g. the resolution doesn´t always count when it comes to TV-channels.. Plenty of factors comes to play with SD TV and HDTV...

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

Like a few who have aready responded, I haven't seen an HD broadcast that is close to a good HD DVD or Blu-ray video presentation. Audio-wise the divide between the two is even more pronounced.





Crawdaddy

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

I have 3 tv's: 32" 720p set, 42" edtv, and a 50" 1080p set.
They all run direct tv H20 boxes set at 1080i.
Dozens of folks have seen all 3 working, and not a single person can see a difference between them as far as PQ is concerned. all they really see is 'Ohhh you got 3 flat screens, awesome'
Given that, I see Toshiba doing quite well with this upcomming unit.

Re: Is the format war about to resurface? Does Toshiba have the Blu-ray killer?

I gotta say I'm a little concerned about the enthusiasm some are expressing about this. HTF's mission statement has always been about getting the best possible representation of the original theatrical experience at home. The best currently available way to do that is true 1080p media, and giving a lot of attention to something that seeks to make true 1080p media a niche market kinda strikes me as going against the entire intent of HTF. Many public statements made about this technology by Toshiba make it clear the intent of it is to try and minimize Blu-Ray's impact and hinder it's adoption. It's no coincidence why you don't hear other major CE manufacturers hyping it up. This is purely a political move, something of a parting shot from Toshiba, and I think if HTF is truly about the best possible presentation of film at home, they won't lend it a lot of support and credence.

It just seems like there is something of an undercurrent hoping for Blu-Ray to still somehow come out a niche format or never quite get off the ground, and that troubles me, as Blu Ray's all we've got at this point. At this point, the idea of "Super upconversion" minimizing true HD's market size and acceptance is about as appealing to me as if they decided to start releasing all DVDs and BDs in fullscreen. Maybe we as a community should be putting some pressure on Toshiba to get better and not bitter and let the remaining true HD media have a shot without trying to cut it off at the knees.