THE FRONT LINE: APRIL 6, 2006
Toshiba’s HD DVD Demo
I took some time today to catch the HD DVD demo at the Tweeter store in King of Prussia, PA. Was it impressive? Sort of. Could it have looked better? Definitely!
Toshiba has been touring around the country with these demonstrations for a few months now. This was my best and perhaps last chance to see the demo before retail shipments of the players start later this year.
My timing couldn’t have been better. Thursday mornings are pretty quiet for home theater store traffic, and I had the demo and Toshiba’s Dan O’Donnell all to myself. The HD-XA1 player (MSRP $799) was connected not to a corresponding Toshiba HDTV, but instead to a Mitsubishi WD-62628 62-inch 1080p DLP rear-projection set. (Apparently there were logistics problems getting a Toshiba set up and running in that Tweeter store.)
The demo consisted of a split-screen that had 1080i/30 content on the left screen (yes, it was 1080i, NOT 1080p, and clearly identified as such) and standard definition video on the right screen. (Coding was in the MPEG-4 format.)
The camera panned slowly over a variety of flowers, a glass bowl, and other objects on a white tablecloth. This was followed by a clip of cars and people moving across a stone bridge, then by a clip of a large steamship passing across the field of view. The final clip was a high-angle, compressed telephoto view of traffic proceeding down a bust city street.
Figure 1. Toshiba’s HD DVD split-screen test is shown on the Mitsubishi 1080p RPTV.
While the video on the 1080i side was clearly sharper in all cases, it wasn’t “amazingly” so. In fact, the SDTV video on the right side looked awful — worse than progressive-scan SDTV, and more like VHS quality with lots of blocking artifacts and scan lines seen. In that context, the 1080i side of the demo easily won, hands down.
The Mitsubishi set needed calibration badly. The color temperature was too high (I dropped it), the edge enhancement was on (I shut it off), sharpness was too high (I turned it back) and a noise filter was blurring the image (I shut it down). All of these tweaks really improved picture quality, particularly when trailers of King Kong, 40-Year-Old Virgin and Batman Returns were shown.
What I couldn’t fix was the Mits’ false contouring. This was evident whenever gradations were seen, such as in a deep blue sky or in the colored halo around the titles in the King Kong trailer. I also noticed scan line artifacts in the split screen demo, particularly the section that showed city traffic. The “twitter” was quite evident, so the 1080i to 1080p deinterlacing and motion compensation in the Mits set wasn’t up to the task.
A couple of conclusions could be drawn: First, the RPTV demo didn’t show HD DVD in its best light. Yes, the images were crisp and detailed, but they could have and should have looked a lot better, given the format’s data rate of 36 Mb/s — double that of ATSC HDTV.
Second, while the HD DVD 1080i content was clearly better than the soft, artifact-ridden video on the right side split screen, a demo on two identical TVs with one of them feeding 480p through a good scaling chip (like Silicon Optix’ Realta HQV) would have presented more of a level playing field — and I’ll bet more than one viewer of that demo would not have seen any difference, unless they stood close to the screen.
Figure 2. The HD-XA1 player has a clean, subtle design.
Given that there are some good DVD player/scaler combinations out there for reasonable prices, it would appear that purchasing the HD-XA1 player (or the HD-A1, $499) might not make sense unless you have a quality 1080p TV to do it justice. As I found out, even a name brand 1080p RPTV couldn’t hack it. You might be similarly disappointed if your 1080p set doesn’t fully process 1080i signals.
Hopefully I’ll be able to get hold of this player in the next few months and hook it up to a 1080p front projector, or even one of the new 1080p plasma sets coming to market, so I can really see the difference — and also run some side-by-side tests with the aforementioned DVD/scaler combination.
