Panasonic RP91 and Big Lebowski (1 Viewer)

[Sean Patrick]

last night i tried going through all of my dvd's and correcting misflagged discs.

The Big Lebowski is causing me some problems...

first off, the menu screen load up in "zoom" no matter how i re-set it. as long as i don't eject the disc, if i go back to the menus it's fine once i re-set the settings to "shrink", but when i eject and reload, the menus load as "zoom".

plus, another odd observation. if i press "fullscreen" and then zoom in, it looks EXACTLY like the widescreen presentation. No apparent loss of detail, which makes NO sense. i know the fullscreen is open matte but i should at least be seeing a softer picture, right??

thanks

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Don't know about the menu issue, which I believe I've seen w/ a couple other non-16x9 DVDs.

RE: the open matte zoomed PQ, maybe the 16x9 presentation was actually using the same open matte master to do the DVD transfer, ie. "fake" 16x9.

_Man_

 

[Carlo_M]

Sean,

The RP91 was lauded for its excellent zooming/scaling abilities. Non-anamorphic titles like Vertigo and Titanic look wonderful zoomed on my RP91.

That said, you should still see a bit of loss, what kind of set are you using?

 

[Sean Patrick]

i'm using a 38" 16:9 tube (RCA F38310).

it still looks very good, i was just surprised how good zooming the open matte tranfer looked. if there is any loss in resolution it is not big.

there are quite a few non-anamorphic titles i own that look even better scaled to 16:9 than some true 16:9 enhanced titles. for instance, most of my non-anamorphic titles look better than the 2 recent Coen Bros. dvd's, and those were 16:9.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

I have to agree about the high quality letterbox zoom/scaling of the RP91 although I do notice the difference myself. Generally, the scaled letterbox images look slightly less focused/sharp than decent 16x9 images. It's a general overall quality difference I see, not necessarily any obvious loss of detail.

Of course, I also don't (and can't) do side-by-side comparison between a non-16x9 and a 16x9 version of the same image. I just watch my DVDs and enjoy.

_Man_

 

[Carlo_M]

Sean, I think Robert Harris put it best (and I'm totally paraphrasing) - anamorphic encoding is a tool that can be used to *make* a great transfer, but is not a guarantee of one!

I can think of some anamorphic transfers that can't hold up to the RP91 scaled Vertigo or Titanic picture...

 

[dpippel]

Like, bummer, man.

Sorry. Someone had to do it though...