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News Search . EXCLUSIVE: Early Samsung Blu-ray Players Ship with Chip Mistake
July 19th, 2006 — By editor
A noise-reduction chip mars Samsung’s Blu-ray player’s premiere for early adopters. On picture quality: “This was not dazzling.”
by Scott Wilkinson, The Perfect Vision
July 18 - I’ve been reviewing some Blu-ray titles sent from Sony on Samsung’s BD-P1000, but, like many of the early adopters out there, I’ve been less than impressed.
Sony arranged to have some titles sent to me for the review, and as I went through them, I was surprised at how soft they looked compared with the best HD DVDs I’ve seen. The images simply didn’t “pop;” there was no “wow” factor as there was with HD DVD. I was left with the same impression watching them on a Samsung HL-S5687W 56-inch 1080p DLP RPTV and a Samsung SP-H710AE 720p DLP front projector.
What was going on here? I’ve seen a dozen dazzling Blu-ray demos over the past two years: This was not dazzling. “The Fifth Element,” “Terminator 2,” “House of Flying Daggers,” “Memento,” “Lord of War,” “Crash,” “UltraViolet;” all looked not much better than upconverted DVD. Not only that, “The Fifth Element” had obvious scratches and dirt from using a substandard print in the mastering process.
Don Eklund, executive vice president of advanced technologies at Sony Pictures, noticed that the player’s image did not match the quality of the master tapes from which the Blu-ray titles were encoded. He contacted Samsung, whose engineers determined that the noise-reduction circuit in the player’s Genesis scaler chip was enabled, causing the picture to soften significantly.
According to Jim Sanduski, senior vice president of marketing for Samsung’s Audio and Video Products Group, “Samsung is currently working to revise the default settings on the noise-reduction circuit in the Genesis scaler chip to sharpen the picture. All future Samsung BD-P1000 production will have this revision and we are working to develop a firmware update for existing product.”
An easy fix, but still…
To see the difference for myself, I went to Sony Pictures, where Eklund had set up and calibrated three identical displays (the Samsung LN-S4095D 40-inch 1080p LCD flat panel) driven by an unmodified BD-P1000, a modified player (with the noise reduction turned off), and the master tape from which the Blu-ray disc being played had been encoded.
We looked at two titles, “Memento” and “50 First Dates,” and sure enough, the modified player looked much closer to the master tape and far better than the unmodified player. Disabling the Genesis chip’s noise reduction improved sharpness significantly and reduced the occasional temporal artifacts that were sometimes evident in dark, solid backgrounds on the unmodified player. Also, it allowed the film grain - an intentional form of noise - to become more evident.
To get some sense of the difference between HD DVD and Blu-ray, video guru Joe Kane brought his Toshiba HD-XA1 HD DVD player over to Grayscale Studio, The Perfect Vision’s new video lab. We connected it and the Samsung BD-P1000 to a Gefen HDMI switcher whose output was sent to a Samsung SP-H710AE 720p DLP projector (review in Issue 70 of TPV) firing onto a Stewart GrayHawk RS screen. Granted, it’s not a 1080p display, but its characteristics are well know to both of us, so we could easily see any difference between the two players, which were set to output 1080i. (The Toshiba’s 720p output is poor, so we let the projector do the deinterlacing and scaling.)
We started with HD DVDs, including clips from “Blazing Saddles”, “Apollo 13?, and “Phantom of the Opera”. All were spectacular, sharp as a razor with detail to spare. Then we switched over to Blu-ray, playing clips from “The Fifth Element” and “Terminator 2.” Aside from “The Fifth Element”’s obvious dirt and scratches, both titles looked decidedly soft compared to the HD DVDs. The THX logo on “T2? looked sharper than the movie, which had some significant edge-enhancement as well.
Give Samsung’s player another shot
Unfortunately, I cannot yet draw any definitive conclusions about the Samsung BD-P1000’s video performance. I was able to spend only an hour with a player in which the Genesis noise reduction was disabled, and it did look markedly better than a stock player on the same model of display. But I’ll need to spend more time with one on my own to know for sure how much improvement that modification represents.
It’s not that the images from the original player looked bad; to an untrained eye without direct comparison, they would probably look pretty good. Still, when I showed some clips to a friend without a trained eye, he said, “So, what exactly is high-definition about this?” That just about says it all.
I believe that Blu-ray has the potential to look every bit as good as HD DVD, perhaps even a little better for a number of technical reasons. And it’s not uncommon to encounter some bumps in the launch of any new format. Once Samsung fixes the noise-reduction problem, I have every confidence that Blu-ray will look fabulous.
How long was it for Toshiba to release 1.1 after the product launched?
