PS3 reviews... looking forward to some hands-on comments... (1 Viewer)

[ToEhrIsHuman]

Ummm...this may sound like a pointless question (i.e. why the heck would someone want to do that?), but can someone let me know if you can watch Blu-Ray movies via the PS3 on a SD 480i TV? I mean...you can play PS3 games over 480i I know, so I want to know about movies. The reason I ask is I have a 20GB PS3 on order but I won't be upgrading my TV until after the holidays. I do want to buy some Blu-Ray movies in the meantime in lieu of purchasing SD DVDs now (or waiting until next year.) If someone knows the answer to this question or can test this out for me it would be appreciated. Cheers.

 

[Cory S.]

Craig,

I have the Xbox 360 add-on HD drive hooked up to my standard TV and it works perfectly fine. I ended up buying it as an investment. I plan to get a standalone Blu-Ray player sometime next fall and then after that upgrade to a HDTV.

But even on a standard TV, you can see a slight difference from DVD. Case in point, Batman Begins in HD-DVD. The moment I popped in the HD-DVD, I saw a difference in color and sharpness compared to the DVD. I was stunned.

After I bought the 360 add-on, I decided then that I would own both formats, although I want my standalone HD player to be Blu-Ray, so I'm gonna wait....unless the PS3, through firmware, makes an upconversion update, then I might think about using the PS3 as the standalone player instead.

 

[RobertSiegel]

I was seeing on Ebay the auctions for the PS3, and after viewing some blu-ray movies, I wouldn't sell it for anything.

Brian, I am anxious to hear more about your results with the Pearl, as I am saving for one and hopefully soon will be able to order it and use it with my PS3. I am viewing now on the Sony vpl-11ht projector and all I can say is WOW. I watched THE WILD and I have to say that this movie on bluray is the best signal my projector has ever seen. The picture is absolutely stunning. I got an early copy of Ice Age 2, and the same applies.

 

[Chris S]

Looks like you might not be the only one with the problem. CheapyD from cheapassgamer.com is having a similar issue and has a youTube video at the CAG site (here) of what he is seeing. Is this appear to be the same issue you are having? I'll be connecting my unit via my PS2 component cables for now. I would be curious if they also produce the same problems.

 

[ToEhrIsHuman]

It does not sound all that favorable for me short-term, but no biggie. I guess I'll try the 'Talladega Nights' pack-in and see what happens. I actually have an HD-compatible TV with HDMI upstairs that I can try it on too. But thanks again for the insight.

 

[Brian Kaz]

I got a new HDMI cable and have found that my PS3s HDMI port isn't faulty. My other cables just don't fit snugly which unfortunately, the PS3 wants. I can literally pop the new cable in tight every time and have no problems whatsoever. But as soon as I try the Monster cable, it goes in slightly loose and has trouble syncing. Anyways, I'm glad that problem is solved.

 

[Ryan-G]

Well,

Looks like reports are coming in that Sony's unsure of how to resolve the problem, and even worse, there's reports stating that if 1080i/p isn't available the PS3 is downconverting BR movies to 480p instead of 720p.

Very serious problem considering most LCD's and many Plasma's are 720p even today.

If Sony can't come up with a quick resolution, this could have serious implications for the format war. Without the PS3 as a wedge into the market, it may very well drive studios to HD-DVD. There's just too many 720p only TV's on the market today.

They could in theory move the downcoversion onto the Cell and GPU itself, but that's going to take some serious time to recode.

Going to be interesting to see how it plays out.

Info link(Dailytech is Anandtech's news ticker, run by the same people. Anandtech is one of the most respected computer hardware sites on the net.)

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5076

 

[DaViD Boulet]

Ryan,

please explain more about this. Almost all 720P flatscreens accept 1080i60 input. So as long as the PS3 can output 1080i, there's no problem (the plasma can convert internally to 720p):


I suspect that the number of HDTV sets that cannot accept 1080i is virtually nil. Every 720P native display I've been aware of for the past 3 years has been able to accept 1080i60 without a problem (given that it's been the standard HD broadcast since HD began).

Am I missing something?

 

[Ryan-G]

I'm afraid I don't have the answers at this point David, due to limited information, as there aren't many PS3's on the market at this point.

The big issue is going to be how the formating is communicated to the PS3, PS3's going to want to send a 1080i/p signal to the TV. If the TV is returning that it doesn't support that display type, problems arise. While the TV may downcovert said signal, it's not necessarily in it's specs it transmits.

For example, my 360 is conncected to my new Westinghouse 27" LCD that has a max res of a little over 720p. While I'm sure it'll downconvert a 1080i signal, the 360 won't let me send it, the only options that aren't grayed out are the ones it officially supports. 13xx by 768 and lower.

If PS3's getting it's info the same way, here's the problem. The PS3 is doing the downconversion, not the TV, because if the PS3 ships the signal unconverted from a BR disc it should be shipped 1080p. So, if the PS3's not seeing a 1080i support on the TV, it'll downconvert, and it drops to 480p instead of 720p according to available info.

It's theoretically possible that the media could be converted by the PS3 to 1080i and then shipped to the TV that could convert to 720p, but I'm unsure if that'd introduce an element of lag causing sound to desynch.

Now this is all just my understanding and based upon the information I have available. I don't have a PS3 or know anyone who does, so I can't comment for certain, but there's where I think the problem lies.

 

[PeterTHX]

Well, I would RETURN that thing asap.

DaVid's right, even most EDTVs can accept a 1080i signal.

 

[Ryan-G]

I respect your opinions as you're definitely a very knowledgable individual.

But there's a difference between accepting a signal and displaying a signal, many pieces of hardware will respond to a query on capabilities by what it can do, not necessarily what it can accept.

This TV can accept 1080i, but it's display is 1360x768.

Of course, part of the difference could be that I'm running through the VGA port as I need the RCA inputs for my seperate speakers.

 

[dpippel]

I think so. If the player cannot send a video signal to the display in its native resolution (720p in this case), then you're stuck using the scaler in the *display* and you're adding another processing step to the signal path. As we videophiles know, this can introduce image degradation and is preferably avoided.

 

[PeterTHX]

Well, there you go

VGA sends control signals to give the output device some idea of its capabilities (re: computer monitors).

AFAIK component doesn't have this ability, so outputting it from a 360 or PS3 in component mode in 1080i will either work or not. The sending device doesn't know if it is acceptable or not to the input device (hence the output warnings). This was a problem on a family members' old Mitsubishi CRT, where one set of component inputs accepted 720p & 1080i and one set accepted 480i or 480P ***only***, resulting in a skewed mess of a picture.

 

[DaViD Boulet]

Seems to me that if the issue was just HDMI communication, then it would be a *very* easy firmware fix to allow the PS3 to send 1080i to non-native-1080 displays which were able to accept that resolution (ie, virtually all HDTVs) but not necessarily show a native 1920 x 1080 signal.

I honestly think this issue is being misrepresented in that article. Let's wait to hear more... so far I've not seen a consumer device that couldn't send 1080i over HDMI even to 720P displays... that includes the Samsung BD player and the Toshiba HD DVD player: both could send 1080i over HDMI as long as the display could *accept* it.



Well, if the game or movie is encoded as 1920 x 1080 resolution the image will obviously have to be downscaled somewhere in order to display on a digital display of any differing resolution. That's nothing surprising or even alarming. That happens right now with anyone watching a BD or HD DVD movie who doesn't have a full 1920 x 1080 display device. So far, most folks with 1280 x 720 digital displays aren't complaining because the downscaled image looks better than anything else they've ever seen on that same display.


Here's the point: Whether the player (ps3) does the downscaling, or the display device does the downscaling.... it will get downscaled. As to which way looks better: it's purely device dependent; which device does a better job downscaling? Since the video signal will be kept in the digital domain, it will suffer far less degradation than the typical routine of running analog and then having a whole other a/d/ cycle for additional processing in the display.

The real problem with scaling video is when the video gets scaled *twice*. As long as the native 1920 x 1080 (i or p, either way) signal can get into the display, then it will only get scaled once to match the native resolution of the display panel. Whether the TV does this or the PS3 were able to downscale to the matching resolution may or may not result in any difference in perceived quality.

 

[Shawn Perron]

Actually, with so many TVs not properly deinterlacing 1080i and therefore bobbing the signal to an equivalent 1920x540p, scaling twice may provide you a better picture on a display with less then 1920x1080p resolution. My Sony displays at 1388x768p. When presented with a 1080i signal, it treats the input signal as 1920x540p/60. After scaling the maximum effective resolution I can ever see is 1388x540p. If I input a 720p signal, I could theoretically see the entire 1280x720p resolution since it's less then my TVs native resolution. As long as the source does a good job scaling 1920x1080p to 1280x720p, there is just no way it can provide the same amount of resolution sending my TV a 1080i signal.

It's a shame almost all older HDTVs do not properly deinterlace 1080i before scaling. You are forced to compromise the picture for anything short of an external scaler and the ability to accept that imput resolution. Hell, most 1080p HDTVs sold today still don't properly deinterlace a 1080i signal. It should be false advertising to see a HDTV advertised as 1080p that cannot fully resolve a 1080p image from a 1080i source.

 

[dpippel]

David, thanks for the remedial lesson on resolutions and scaling, but it wasn't required.

Obviously, the video in this case will need to be downscaled *somewhere* and it's common for the scaler in the player to be superior to what's found in many displays. Ask anyone who uses an *upconverting* SD DVD player to send 720p/1080i output to a fixed-pixel display. *If* it's true that the PS3 will not properly output 720p, it will be be a limitation.

 

[Grant H]

Of course, one's TV wouldn't have to "de-interlace" a 1080i image to 720p (actually scaling to a lower resolution, not simply recombining fields of the same resolution) if it could just display 1080i, one of the standard HDTV formats from day 1!

It's all those damned flat TV's and their limitations more than anything else. My TV is much older than most who bought any of those types of displays, but it natively displays 1080i (as I would imagine every CRT-based, projection-or-direct view, HDTV or HDTV-ready set does), something that should have been a much higher priority for all TV manufacturers. It's a problem with settling for a "good enough" high definition image on a new technology.

My manufacturer considered 720p less a priority on the other hand, and just decided to have the set upscale all OTA signals. As I think only Fox broadcasts in 720p, that was probably the better call to make. Though, at the time, I think it was just a a matter of what kind of scan rates CRTs could achieve. 480p and 1080i inputs all good (displays them natively); 720p component input, on the other hand, is a different story. HD boxes, thankfully, upscale those limited 720p broadcasts.

 

[ToEhrIsHuman]

Well, I picked up my PS3 60GB @ Target just before noon today. I guess this means I can post on the Blu-ray forum now, eh? Unfortunately, I won't be able to provide any "hands-on comments" for another month because I'm waiting until Xmas to open the darn thing up and plug it in. [sigh.] Oh well...at least I can stop all the frantic shopping now. Definitely looking forward to more BD software reviews so I know which titles to pick up and which to avoid. Speaking of...anybody grab the Donner Cut of 'Superman II' on BD yet? I'll watch for comments in the software forum.

 

[DaViD Boulet]

I agree that in real-world terms, many times upscaling software in playback devices seems better, in practice, than what's in the display.

However, I haven't found that to be as consistently true with downscaling. In fact, I've found that letting my cable box feed 1080i to my 720p projector looks better than letting the cable box do the 720p downconversion on its own.

I do agree that it's a limitation of the PS3 not to provide a 720p downconversion option (especially one that doesn't incur the bob/weave deinterlacing step that many sets do when processing 1080i to 720p), but I don't see it as a show-stopper.

BTW, at avs discussion seemed to indicate that all of this talk might be about games only. Is that the understanding here? That the PS3 will downscale 1080 movies to 720 but not 1080 games?

 

[James St]

PC Watch posted some good info on the PS3. The article is in Japanese so credit One at Beyond3D forums for the translation...

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=36188

Masakazu Honda currently runs a mini-series articles titled "Another Story of PS3" in his regular series articles (Weekly Mobile News) at PC Watch. It reports about the audio/video capability of the PS3 by interviewing Sony developers in charge of audio/video players in the PS3. Here are some findings gleaned from them. As I'm no audio/videophile, I hope someone clarify how much they should be appreciated in the world of buffs.

The first in the series is about the SACD player.
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2.../mobile357.htm