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A coworker lent me Seasons 1 & 2 of "Lost", and they looked very good when played on my old Toshiba HDDVD player, which I have set to scale to 1080i.I was ready to be blown away by Season 3, which I bought on Blu-Ray. Popped it into my PS/3 and it looked...alright. Maybe softer and smoother, and somehow not quite right. I had more or less mothballed that Toshiba, but now that I take the time to really compare, it simply looks better than the PS/3 as a upscaling DVD player, and maybe better when playing high-def media too. Same sort of HDMI cable used to connect both players directly to my 1080P Sharp TV, btw.
Wondering if I should consider getting a dedicated B-D player?!
Edits: 05/20/09Follow Ups:
In the end, it was the test patterns included on Pixar B-D movies which really helped a lot, along with Sony's online PS/3 manual. Biggest problem with my prior configuration is that I had super-whites turned on, and with my Sharp LCD, these actually make bright highlights look kind of bleached. TV itself can't deliver all of the high values either, rendering the 3 brightest shades of gray as pure white.
Even so, I thought things looked pretty good after this latest tuneup.
It was top dog for so long but many dedicated BD players now surpass it for picture and sound quality.Still un-equalled for loading times though the gap is narrowing.
The latest LGs and Samsungs are very quick.
Panasonic's new BD60 and 80 are not as fast but better picture and sound.
They would be a good place to start.
Edits: 05/22/09
What you say goes against experience. For BD. For both digital audio and video. For (upscaled) DVD though the PS3 is easy to beat.
With BD, since the players are so close in their BD video output, the display will make by far the most diff. The diff between players for BD is way more about other factors than their quality of HDMI A/V output.
That said, I don't think I would recommend someone buy a PS3 NOW strictly for BD/DVD playing. For the same money there are players more convenient to integrate into more types of HT systems. The PS3 is an AV computer, not strictly a "disc player", with the pros and cons that has.
The first thing I would check out when deciding on a brand is to see how often they put out firmware updates. This is incredibly important, and some companies are quite poor for this. Otherwise you will regularly find new BDs your player won't play.
Whose experience ?
A lot of reviews and various HT forums have commented on how the new wave of stand alone BD players surpass the PS3 for BD playback.
Agree the display can make a lot of difference, I use an ISF calibrated Pioneer plasma.
Disagree on the closeness of BD performance.
Compare a PS3, Panasonic, Pioneer, Marantz, Denon and you will see differences.
Frequency of firmware upgrades is not a sign of quality but of how on the ball companies are at sorting out problems. Some compainies get the product right form day one, many do not.
My experience. And that of plenty of others too. Very very little diff. Not enough to bother with, and as I said, not even close to being the biggest consideration when choosing a model. It is not at all like DVD which requires a lot of jiggery-poke to get a good image. BD is quite straight-forward using the available chips, for HDMI output.
I have a dealer friend (he's the owner) who does Denon, Marantz, Pioneer Elite. Though of course he has to pay for his personal gear, it is "cheap" for him. He chooses to use a PS3 for BD on his Pio Elite display (only at home of course). Because it plays everything. Doesn't use it for DVD though. The problem is the brands he sells don't update firmware nearly often enough. Panasonic and Samsung have similar records with that so far, let's see how they do with their newer models.
I have the feeling you are just getting into BD if you think regular firmware updates are not extremely critical and necessary at this stage still. Can make BD viewing very frustrating otherwise.
If you hate using a gaming machine or just Sony, well then say that. Plenty of people do. Not so keen on those aspects myself...
I would check out what the Oppo BDP-83 users say. The current owners are very critical and have a good range of players to compare with. After all, they PAID to essentially debug them. I have a Pio 151 to view on and am fairly picky. I see so little diff between BDPs with BD over HDMI that I am far more interested in how they handle DVDs, which *does* vary hugely, strictly because of the limited content in BD. This DVD handling is the significant downside to the PS3, and I guess its overall cost including integration into an HT system.
Anyway, enjoy the Panny. You can be virtually assured that no other BD player makes BD look better.
Not quite a BD noob...I have been lucky to avoid the issues that some have had.
:)
No bias against Sony or the PS3, was using a borrowed PS3 for a while.
Did consider the OPPO BDP-983, read through all the fanboy love letters, but the locked DVD zone ruled it out.
Currently trying the new Panny 60/80.
Good with BD and surprisingly good with DVD, slightly better PQ than my OPPO DV983 and easily DVD multi-zoned.
Edits: 05/24/09
That's not the case with the PS3: firmware updates on the PS3 are usually for giving the user more and/or better features -- it's not solely used to fix what was messed up or not implemented properly. For how many stand-alones can the same be said? All you have to do is look at the PS3's capabilities at launch and compare them to what it can do today. It's all been done in firmware, not by the introduction of a "new and improved" model. Compare the cost of a new player (or maybe even 2 - 3 new players since the PS3 launced in November 2006) to the cost of the PS3's free firmware updates and I don't think an Economics degree is needed to see the light.
The PS3 is an evolving machine: firmware updates were part of its evolution since Day 1.
We recently watched a B-D of Clear and Present Danger from our PS3-80 projected onto our 100" screen. (HDMI video direct to 1080p projector, digital audio direct to pre/pro.) If what we enjoyed was mediocre, I'll take mediocre any day. That's been true for every B-D we've bought, but some of the B-Ds we've gotten through NETLIX have been less superlative, so it depends on the flick.
db
I would say it's an excellent BD player, but not the "best". I haven't noticed any problems, and I'm quite picky. And it's still faster than most. You wouldn't think speed would be a factor, but just try one of the slow ones (most all, until very recently)...some aspects of BD can be real slow without some computing power behind them it seems, which is where the PS3 excels.
For DVD, it is "OK". Much better than some at upscaling, but IMO not as good as the most recent quality BDPs, nor as good as the HD-DVDP I had. Seems artifact-free in general. The problems I see are in the source material. I scale to 1080p. If you scale to 1080i, the "problems" you see may be in your display's de-interlacer, some (many!) of which are quite poor.
Be very careful how you set the PS3 up. The included manual is mostly useless, the online one much better. There are some potential "gotchas" for PS3 BD setup.
Well, apart from the fact that it doesn't have dedicated analog surround outputs for those who want that, I don't find the PS3 lacking in performance. I run HDMI straight to the display, and optical sound output to my receiver.
Running Blu-Rays, from the superbly remastered "The Searchers" through "Cool Hand Luke" and "The Shining", I have been getting a beautiful image on my Panny 58. Texture, detail, very nice indeed. Regular discs also shine on that unit.
CC.
I own a small handful of Blu-Ray discs and they all look very good in my setup compared to the same DVD's upsampled from my Denon DV-5900 player.
I'm running R G B cables from the PS3 and supposedly higher quality digital DVI cable from my Denon to the TV.
VS.
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