MALATA N996 and Video Filters (1 Viewer)

[Bleddyn Williams]

Like a number of people here, I took the plunge for multi-region playback, and just received one of these machines yesterday.
The manual isn't exactly comprehensive, but set up was straightforward.
Playback of R1 DD & DTS with my Denon 3200 and Millennium 246 DTS decoder both seemed fine.
Video quality on my 27" 4:3 TV via S-Video looked very good with R1 NTSC.
With R2 PAL discs, however, I noticed a nasty shimmering which was most obvious for the titles of "The Royle Family" and also on the text of menu options for some Hong Kong Legends discs, like DRUNKEN MASTER.
In fact, looking at the menus for "IRON MONKEY" (the menus are also letterboxed for PAL on this player, unlike R1)I noticed that the edge of the letterboxing was actually shimmering up and down at top and bottom.
I vaguely remembered reading something about video filters beforehand (I failed to find it again before this post) and found that if I changed the filter from MOVIE to STILL, the shimmering totally disappeared!
I found two drawbacks from doing this - the first shot of Royle Family episode 1 has a camera tilt, and when it happens, a very distracting "blinds" effect occurs. Also, in ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA, there is a bonus Jet Li interview. When he moves his hands, the same effect occurs.
Interestingly enough, I watched Drunken Master in its entirety last night, and with all the fast motion, I saw not one problem.
Could this be a matter of source? Jet Li's interview comes from VHS and the main feature transfer doesn't seem to share the problems.
Also - are there any drawbacks to using the still filter otherwise? If I just leave it on, does it negatively affect NTSC? I didn't notice anything, but my time with the player is still pretty short.
Those of you with 4:3 displays - what settings are you using for your PAL discs?
Any feedback appreciated, as always....
Bleddyn
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[Bleddyn Williams]

Whoops, I should probably have put this in the Hardware forum. Moderators, if you think its more relevant there, please move!

Bleddyn
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[Jason_H]

I, too, just received my Malata yesterday to supplement my Panasonic RP-91. I am very impressed with this player so far. I have not tried playing any R1 stuff at all, I'll stick to my Panny for that...I use the Malata for R2 and R4 PAL discs.
I use the 'Smart' video filter which seems to handle well in almost all cases (this seems to be the consensus). I have one disc where there is a lot of shimmering...I had also heard that the 'Still' filter would fix this and tried it...but it had no effect in this case. So I stick to 'Smart'. If you want a whole lot of info on the Malata, check out the AVS Forum (www.avsforum.com)....their hardware section has many threads on the subject.

 

[Matt_Stevens]

SMART does the trick 9 times out of 10. A better ratio than my old Toshiba SD-5109.
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www.deceptions.net/superman

 

[Scott Barnhart]

Bleddyn,
Video Filter on the Malata changes how the de-interlacing works. On this player (and any other player using the current Mediamatics chip) the interlaced signal is derived from the de-interlaced (progressive) signal, so Video Filter affects interlaced picture also.
Anyway, from what I have read, "Still" is the right setting for PAL film-based sources, such as movies. The 2 problem scenes you mentioned both sound like they were originally shot on video. The Malata is not a very good deinterlacer for any video-based source, apparently (See recent DVD Shootout II), but as Matt says, Smart seems to do well in most situations. Still is really bad for NTSC sources, from my experience.
So anyway, with my Malata, I run PAL movies in "Still" and everything else in "Smart".
Hope this helps,
Scott
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Scott Barnhart
[email protected]