Samsung Ships the First Blu-Ray Player

DigitalDame2 writes "PCMag.com reports that beginning June 25th, consumers will be able to purchase the first Blu-Ray player: the Samsung BD-P1000. The BD-P1000 is twice the price of the HD-A1 ($999.99 list), but supports full 1080p playback, something the first generation of HD-DVD players do not. It also up-converts conventional DVDs to 1080p to improve video quality and comes with HDMI, Component, S-video, and composite outputs. The BD-P1000 will be sold at more than 200 retail locations, including Best Buy, Tweeter, and Circuit City, and 10 Blu-Ray titles will be available as well."

Comments

Early Adoptor? Not this time.

[ackthpt]

Gosh! Only $999.99 list (or as we learned from The Price Is Right, the price you ask if you never plan to actually sell any, except to the most gullible or desperate, actual price will probably be about $700) I can wait.

When VCRs came out I bought a rather nice one for ~900$US. When CD's came out I bought a nifty CD player for about 700$US. I was a little more patient with DVDs but eventually got a DVD drive for a home computer and then a portable player (computer ~70$US, Portabl ~1000$US) As I'm pretty well past the point of being impressed with Eye Candy in cinema, I'll probably only get a Blu-Ray when there's significant offerings and most of the newer films I must have are only available via that channel.

Wow...

[martinultima]

A thousand bucks, and there will only be ten titles when it first comes out? Now I can see why only obsessive early adopters would want something like this – quite honestly, I just don't see the point of getting a $1000 device that can only play 10 titles (no matter how high-definition the titles and/or the point may be).

Re:Wow...

[Jherek Carnelian]

About 30 for HD-DVD http://www.deepdiscountdvd.com/format.cfm?classID= 1
and 25 within the next month for BLU-RAY http://www.deepdiscountdvd.com/format.cfm?classID= 2

Not that anyone in their right mind would purchase either since both formats are DRM - Defective Recorded Media.

Samsung pppbpbpbbbbttt

[the eric conspiracy]

If it is like other Samsung video players the attention to details like black level etc. won't be that great. I'd wait on this one unless you have money to burn.

1080p?

[sam1am]

Anyone know if that is 1080p/60 or just 1080p/24? Didn't see this specified on Samsung's website or in the user manual.

Re:1080p?

[Anonymous Coward]

Capable of 1080p60.

Of course... There isn't any 1080p60 CONTENT. And there isn't going to be, except maybe technical demos, for quite a while. Nearly all films are shot at 24p and any decent HDTV will inverse-telecine back to 1080p24 from 1080i30 telecined frames. And any video-source material out there will be shot in either 720p or 1080i, so really, the 1080p60 is just an additional tick-box on the feature list at this point.
 
Heck, force 24 fps film to be output at 1080p60, and it could look WORSE than telecined 1080i30 because of cadence problems.

I'll take tpb's files labelled "HR-HDTV" thank you

[plasmacutter]

let's do the economics:

$999.99 for the player
$40? for the disks

only a few titles
LOTS of drm infesting it and making it not play full res

or i can just:

take the pc i already have.
open up a browser to TPB or Tspy
search "HR-HDTV"
torrent DL
watch full res HDTV quality encodes for $0-$25 (have to have dvd-r's right?)
and as a bonus, the last 720p movie i saw on xvid took up 3 gigs... you don't need blue-ray or hd-dvd.

thanks hollywood for drawing out the r&d and forcing the added costs of tons and tons of DRM! yet another reason to engage in piracy!

hmmm . . .

[Maradine]

It also up-converts conventional DVDs to 1080p to improve video quality and comes with HDMI, Component, S-video, and composite outputs.

You know, I've always wondered about this, so someone help me out here. Let's say I have a 1080p HDTV. As it's a discrete pixel device, not a CRT, it's got one native resolution, right? And when I plug my 480i/p DVD player into it to watch a movie, the TV is upsampling the signal to use all of the pixels on the display, right? So why is this a feature on the player? How does it improve image quality? Is it using a blingy-er algorithm than the TV would be using? Marketing fluff?

Re:hmmm . . .

[jbreckman]

I'm not sure about this, but I think it's that DVD players do it better than most TVs. I know my 720p TV does an awful upconversion by itself - but with an upconverting dvd player it looks MUCH better.

I've seen TVs that do it well though - it is just that some don't.

Unless you aren't happy with how it looks right now, its probably not worth the investment.

Re:hmmm . . .

[interiot]

The reason that some scalers are better than others is that, once you throw interlaced content into the mix, scaling gets a lot more complicated, and is sometimes just an educated guessing game.

The reason it's in the player is because it's easier to upgrade your player to have a decent scaler than it is to upgrade your TV to get a decent scaler (lots of $$ just for the new TV), or to buy a standalone scaler (standalone scalers aim for the top end of the market).

Ultimately though, you want a scaler that can work with many different inputs, so that your Dreamcast, DVD player, and your video recorder all look good. So having your best scaler be in the DVD player isn't optimal either. Fortunately, scalers in newer TV's are starting to get better (eg. with names like DCDi showing up more).

Re:hmmm . . .

[caudron]

the TV is upsampling the signal to use all of the pixels on the display, right? So why is this a feature on the player? How does it improve image quality? Is it using a blingy-er algorithm than the TV would be using? Marketing fluff?

Actually, that is precisely correct. Full motion image rescaling is a nontrivial task. The TV is rarely (though there are notable exceptions!) the best choice to do the scaling. You want the video to be rescaled before it hits the TV by something a bit more beefy and slickery than what the TV will through at it.

The claim here is that the player's scaler is going to be better than the TV's, but probably not as good as a dedicated scaler. I'm sure you can turn the player's scaler off if you want that done by other equipment.

Is their claim truthful? Who knows? Most likely is is better than the TV, but I've seen some good TV-based scaling.

My home theater setup? http://tom.digitalelite.com/caudroplex.html

Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/

Don't worry you can't see the difference

[llZENll]

There are only 5-10 tvs that will even display 1080p right now, not even the Sony SXBRs can (NOTE many TVs actually display 1080p, but only accept 1080i input, like the SXBR for example).

As can be seen on this chart 720p will do for for most people. The human eye can't resolve the extra detail in the picture from 8' on a 42" diagonal.

Re:Improve Quality?

[Carthag]

They've licensed the technology from CSI. You even get a voice recognition feature that lets you say "zoom... enhance... enhance"

Don't watch them all in one day..

[AWhiteFlame]

All 10 titles? You should -be- so lucky. Back in my day, we had -1- 240x180 AVI of a CGI dancing baby and we -liked- it. You young whippersnappers and your "1820q" and your "ePod" and your "skipe".

Sigh of relief sweeps Sony marketing HQ

[WasterDave]

"Thank god for that, the PS3 is starting to look halfway reasonable again".

Dave

Re:I'll take tpb's files labelled "HR-HDTV" thank

[Jherek Carnelian]

HR-HDTV - full res HDTV quality encodes

If you think the HR xvids are equivalent to full res HDTV, you are missing out.
They are only 960x540 and the bitrate is nowhere near enough to prevent artifacts like macroblocking and mosquito noise.

Don't get me wrong - the HR encodes are better than most any analog tv signal, but it is rare that they are better than a good DVD much less the equal of HD.

You actually can improve the "perceived" quality.

[voxel]

I don't know if they do it on this player or not, but there is some easy-setup software you can do on your PC to check it out for yourself.

Use ffdshow (google for it). It is a DirectX filter (correct me if im wrong), in which youc an apply many effects to an image.

The trick is to scale the DVD 720x480 up to 1080p (or whatever you want) then apply a LANCOZ sharpening filter on ONLY the luma channel. *NOTE: I think I got that right, lancoz on luma channel, its been a while forgive me if im spelling something wrong.

There are actually lots of articles on the net (again google), that talk about this technique.

So I tried it for myself. Low and behold, the image really DOES look better. It amazingly adds "perceived" detail.

The trick again is sharpening only one channel in the image (luma/chroma/something else... (im no expert)).

Re:information which is not there..

[Teddy Beartuzzi]

On a semi-related note, I was browing the HD-DVD section today just for kicks, and every movie I looked at said it was 1080p. Is it safe to assume that there's just a first-gen player limitation, rather than everyone just assuming that we can't fit 1080p stuff on to 15GB (or 30GB, if DL)?

The whole "but ìt's only 1080i" is a total red-herring. From the dvdtalk review:

"In the last couple of days, several technical issues have been put to rest, at least for me. The first was the common accusation that the initial HD DVD players like the Toshiba HD-A1 are deficient because they don't output "full 1080p" resolution, that they are "1080i only." I don't see this as a practical concern. All HD DVD and Blu-ray discs will encode film-sourced material in full 1920x1080 progressive scan resolution at 24 frames per second, which is the film industry standard.

Unfortunately many folks are confusing 1080i acquisition with 1080i transmission. The primary reason we get interlacing artifacts in a 480i, 576i, or 1080i signal is that the frame was originally captured in interlaced format, with the odd scan lines and even scan lines being recorded at two different moments in time. When you reassemble two fields that are offset in time, you get jaggies, moire patterns, barber pole effects, and line twitter. That is not true of either HD DVD or Blu-ray film transfers since the image is scanned progressively from a film frame that represents a single moment in time.

Therefore we would expect to see none of the common evidence of deinterlacing when watching HD DVD or Blu-ray movies that are being transmitted via 1080i. Our first look at HD DVD in 1080i confirms this expectation. After hours of viewing three different HD DVD movies there is simply no evidence of any artifact that might be attributed to the fact that the signal was transmitted in 1080i format. The picture is as clean, stable, and as artifact-free as it could be. There is no visible defect in the image that would be eliminated by switching to 1080p transmission."

Make your decision on HD-DVD vs Blu Ray, but don't do it based on this bogus 1080i issue.