WEGA XBR and Mits 6030 progressive scan player (1 Viewer)

[MarshawnM]

All,

I have a question about my XBR400WEGA (36in) and the Mits 6030 DVD player I picked up for my bedroom.
I purchased a Mits 6030 progressive scan DVD player. Which is connected via component connections (input 5 on the back of the Sony). I set the Mits for 16:9 display, progressive output and Mits progressive film conversion (this does the 3:2 pulldown). The Mits is set for progressive output as well (switch on the back of the player). The thing I’ve seen is that the 16:9 enhanced mode defaults to “OFF” now when I play a DVD. In some cases the picture is displayed in full 4:3, even on DVD’s that are “enhanced for 16:9 displays”. So, I go in and manually set 16:9 to "ON" on the XBR. My question is, by setting the 16:9 enhance mode to “ON” am I now using Sony’s line doubler and not the Mits 3:2 progressive chipset? Or should I continue to set the 16:9 enhance mode to “ON”, thinking that I getting the best of both worlds, Mits progressive scan signal and Sony's unsqeezing of the DVD, giving me a full anamorphic picture (16:9 enhanced pictures). Enlighten me guys please.

-MarshawnM
The "M" stands for "More HD content please"

 

[Jim FC]

Marshawn,
The last thing you wrote is the correct one: leave the DVD player in 16:9 mode and on progressive output, set the TV to "16:9 enhanced on." In this way the DVD player is outputting the highest quality picture, and the TV is acting like a widescreen set by starting to scan the image where it starts, rather than at the top of the screen. Any time the Sony senses a progressive inout it should bypass its own internal line doubler. I don't know why Sony took off the auto 16:9 detection thingy they used to have, I thought it worked great. But anyway, you might have to go into the Sony menu and select 16:9 mode "on" every time you watch a DVD. Kind of a bummer to do that every time, but it looks great. Hope this helps!

 

[Jack Briggs]

Please remember that there's no "unsqueezing" taking place with so-called "anamorphic" DVDs. "Anamorphic" is not even the correct term, but we won't go into that here. All a 16:9-encoded disc does is output a picture in a 16:9 window. It has the same 480 lines of vertical resolution as a 4:3-encoded DVD. But when a 16:9-encoded DVD is played back on a standard 4:3 TV, the player must use more than a third of the scanning lines to paint the black letterboxing bars.

 

[MarshawnM]

Thanks guys, this helps a lot. Jack I'm at little confused as far as what is being done with Sony's 16:9 Enhance Mode. I figured that TV did not scan the picture at the top of the screen (the black bars), but where the picture starts at, therefore not "wasting" scan lines in the black area, (as Jim points out). Is this not the case? When viewing DVD's with the 16:9 Enhanced mode off vs. on, there is a huge difference in picture quality, color stat, sharpness, detail, etc. I figured that this was because all of the 480 lines are being used in the true picture area, and none were being used in the black areas at the top and bottom of the screen. Is this not the case? If not why is the picture so strikingly different with the 16:9 on vs. off?. Thanks.

Marshawn

 

[Jack Briggs]

Well, you have that correct (and maybe I misunderstood how your were using the word "unsqueeze."

In the XBR's 16:9 mode, the scanning-line raster is collapsed into a 16:9 window, with the black bars above and below the image being nothing more than dead space. Your DVD player can then output at 16:9 because the XBR has become, for all intents and purposes, a 16:9 set. So, with the XBR's image "squeezed" for 16:9, the DVD player can output a full 480-line 16:9 picture without the loss in resolution that comes from a DVD player's having to "downconvert" a 16:9-encoded DVD for 4:3 letterboxed display.