seeing something on new 50phd8uk

[10secbee]

Hello, I just recieved my 50phduk and was curious on a couple things I have noticed. I was watching inhd last night and there was a red carpet show on and once in a while when they were showing someone getting their picture taken the white flashes looked digital.(not really sure how to explain this) It was only when there was about 4 or 5 camera flashes at the same time. My ? is is this normal for this technology or do I have a lemon. I have the 8300 set top hooked up through component. The picture looks great otherwise. Also what setting are you using with your 50inch panny. Do you use the 3;2 pulldown or the vnr off or on? THANKS

[10secbee]

Is this normal for plasma? I am coming from a 36inch sony hdtv and never seen anything like this. Thanks again

[boarder]

Well if its coming from a STB then its likely due to video compression. Many times this takes the form of small square "blocks". Usually they are around 16x16 pixels to 64x64 pixels in size. Not much you can do about it other than complain to cable/satellite companies about using heavy compression over hd channels. CRTs tend to not show it as much since they naturally blur/bleed the image, have more gradient levels, and plasmas are usually just like a monitor.
One thing you can do is calibrate your plasma. A lot of times plasmas are too "bright" out of the box and that can effect these types of anamolies.

[10secbee]

Thanks boarder, I am planning on having a calibration done after getting some hours on the tv. Maybe I can reduce it a bit. Thanks again

[aranganath]

Calibration won't reduce this, and to help you feel better, it's not your TV's fault.

MPEG compression works by looking at consecutive frames and only sending the information that's changed to your screen. It breaks the screen up into small squares to do this. Normally this isn't a problem. The background is generally out of focus, and you are paying attention to the foreground which the compression is paying the most attention to. So a decent amount of compression can be achieved without affecting the foreground.

When the camera is in motion, quick pans for example, you also get artifacts, but you don't perceive them because since it's quick motion, your brain expects blurriness. It sees the artifacts, but they don't really register as a problem. The problem with camera flashes and lightning and strobes in general, is that EVERY PIXEL on the screen changes, but the image itself is the same. The compression algorithm does the best it can, but large portions of the image will be starved of detailed information. Especially with red carpet shots, everything is crystal clear and in focus, so the best the algorithm can do turns out to be not very good.

Not sure if that all made sense, and it may have been too much information, but the best you can do is bug your cable company and make sure that they aren't recompressing HD signals.

[boarder]

Calibration can reduce the effect compression sometimes has, but it will not remove it from the source material. I say it can because many times the mpeg artifacts are on solid bright or dark colors which when calibrated can be less noticable. I am not saying they will go away. My original response was that the usualy "Vivid" or nuclear setting that comes by default on a new plasma can cause more of the compression artifacts to surface on black backgrounds that usually would go unnoticed to the average user.

[10secbee]

Is this something that will show up on dvds or xbox or is it just the cable signal?(I have been out of town and not able to try different sources) Thanks for the info

[Blue 911]

Anybody try the Mosquito processor with a plasma?

Mosquito processor (http://www.algolith.com/index.php?id=home_theater&L=0)

It's supposed to remove MPEG compression artifacts. There's a cheaper version also.

Flea processor (http://www.algolith.com/index.php?id=flea&L=0)

The website examples look impressive.

[Xayd]

[QUOTE=10secbee]Is this something that will show up on dvds or xbox or is it just the cable signal?(I have been out of town and not able to try different sources) Thanks for the info[/QUOTE]

it's the cable signal, not much you can do other than introduce some type of blur processing into your video stream, which you probably don't want because it could blur detail that otherwise looks normal.

[QUOTE=aranganath]
When the camera is in motion, quick pans for example, you also get artifacts, but you don't perceive them because since it's quick motion, your brain expects blurriness. It sees the artifacts, but they don't really register as a problem. The problem with camera flashes and lightning and strobes in general, is that EVERY PIXEL on the screen changes, but the image itself is the same. The compression algorithm does the best it can, but large portions of the image will be starved of detailed information. Especially with red carpet shots, everything is crystal clear and in focus, so the best the algorithm can do turns out to be not very good.

[/QUOTE]

the above is exactly correct. if you want a good example, assuming you have the premium channels set your cable box to remind you next time The Matrix: Revolutions comes on in HD, and watch the fight scene at the end between Smith and Keanu Reeves. It's a perfect example. Rain drops falling, water effects on the ground, and lightning strikes. All of which combine to confuse the hell out of whatever mpeg compressor they used and the result is a blocky mess every time lightning strikes or there's an explosion of any kind.

in short, your TV is good enough to show you what bad TV looks like ;).

[10secbee]

Thanks xayd, I'm just happy to hear its not the tvs fault. So just curious is directv any better in hd? Or is it the same deal. Thanks again

[lipcrkr]

This is depressing and pissing me off. So i buy a $3000 TV but can't watch cameras flashing, explosions, or anything "happening". Is this only for plasmas or will this happen on LCD's and RP?

[10secbee]

I really hope hd dvd or bluray gets here soon. :)

[aykew]

Like xayd and aranganath said, it's the signal, not the tv. Feed it a better signal, and it'll display a better picture. (Garbage in, garbage out.) Lipcrkr, the Matrix revolution example is just really a "worst case scenario" in that there just isn't enough bandwidth between you and the origin of the signal to compensate for all that motion and keyframing. Patience- the blu-ray and HD DVD players will be out next year, and they will definitely have the bandwidth. However, for most situations, the HD feed from your content provider will do just fine.

[aranganath]

[QUOTE=lipcrkr]This is depressing and pissing me off. So i buy a $3000 TV but can't watch cameras flashing, explosions, or anything "happening". Is this only for plasmas or will this happen on LCD's and RP?[/QUOTE]

Again, this is a problem with the source. As 10secbee said, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will mitigate the problem for films. There are a lot of factors that determine this. For example, with the red carpet shots, I doubt they had engineers dedicated to maximizing the quality of the video and allocating more bandwidth for the parts that had trouble. On the other hand, for the better television shows in HD, they'll have people dedicated to making sure that every second is as artifact free as possible.

Quite frankly, HD is still a work in progress. The sad thing is that we never even maxed out the quality of SD. A good SD television can look a lot better than what we see when we watch satellite or digital cable which has had the crap compressed out of it. The same thing will happen with HD. As long as the bandwidth is limited, picture quality is going to suffer. Every provider out there would rather give you two channels each with half the quality than give you one at full quality.

I'm pretty convinced we're never going to see full quality HD except for the major networks with an antenna hanging off our house. As they find more ways to increase the bandwidth available to deliver to our house, they'll just start converting more channels to HD for no particular reason and using up the available bandwidth. Case in point, DirecTV. When they busted out on the scene they had the best picture quality available. They increased capacity by throwing up more satellites, but added more channels at an even faster rate, resulting in some of the crappiest picture quality out there. Now we're watching the same thing happen with their hd-lite.

It'll be pretty amusing to see all the garbage that moves over to HD. After all, the only thing thats kept me from buying a ronco food dehydrator all these years is that turkey jerky in SD is just way too blurry.

[JerryNY]

While some display technologies may make this type of artifact more or less noticeable they can only display what is input into them. Garbage in Garbage out. It is more a problem of delivery where the cable companies and/or networks trying to save some money on bandwidth and hurting PQ in the process. This is the reason some channels have much better PQ than other. Theoretically all 1080i (or 720p for that matter) should be as good as one other. I know that my ESPN HD channel here in NY is very nice compared to Fox which looks far worse even though they both are doing 720p. Part of it is equipment too. The Yankees' YES network here in NY seems to have top equipment and generally very nice PQ using 1080i.

Warning MY HD quality rant starts here ;) :

From lens to your TV any part of the chain that has cut corners in quality will show up in the end result. It drives me crazy when I see HD productions where there is a smudge on the lens that someone didn't bother to clean. It arises from the bad habits of an SD world. Another example is poor focus where the auto focus in the camera picks up the contrast in the pattern on a persons clothing or a background and puts the actor's face out of focus. In SD production the limit in resolution would render things like these examples unnoticeable.

My personal favorite is watching something where the camera itself either has a stuck CCD sensor pixel or a really big hunk of lint on the lens which you can tell is particular to one camera as it cuts between them during a multi-camera shoot. Either way it is trivial to map that particular pixel and make it almost unnoticeable. But like I said any corners cut from lens to your screen will have an effect on what you see.

-Jerry C.

[Xayd]

[QUOTE=10secbee]Thanks xayd, I'm just happy to hear its not the tvs fault. So just curious is directv any better in hd? Or is it the same deal. Thanks again[/QUOTE]

from seeing both (cox in new orleans area, and satellite recording samples posted online at various places), i generally find that cable is better than satellite.

one would hope that this gets better when mpeg4 becomes standard for video broadcasting. mpeg4, obviously, compresses better than mpeg2, so at the same bitrate you should get much better results from an mpeg4 broadcast that uses the same amount of bandwidth as an mpeg2 broadcast. if you take that same matrix: revolutions movie and encode it with xvid or divx you'll see that those codecs do exactly that, if you watch it by keyframe (keyframes are whole frames, not partial frames with motion prediction data from other frames). the beginning of the movie has lots of partial frames with an insanely low bitrate, and when you get to the fight scenes at the end virtually every other frame is a keyframe with the most bits spent in a very small timeframe. the result is a much higher bitrate on the fight scenes, lower everywhere else, and a very even quality across the whole film.

will that happen when broadcasters move to mpeg4? who knows, maybe the broadcasters will use the extra bandwidth to bring you infomercials in HD instead of better quality on the existing HD channels.

[lipcrkr]

[QUOTE=aranganath]Again, this is a problem with the source. As 10secbee said, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will mitigate the problem for films. There are a lot of factors that determine this. For example, with the red carpet shots, I doubt they had engineers dedicated to maximizing the quality of the video and allocating more bandwidth for the parts that had trouble. On the other hand, for the better television shows in HD, they'll have people dedicated to making sure that every second is as artifact free as possible.

Quite frankly, HD is still a work in progress. The sad thing is that we never even maxed out the quality of SD. A good SD television can look a lot better than what we see when we watch satellite or digital cable which has had the crap compressed out of it. The same thing will happen with HD. As long as the bandwidth is limited, picture quality is going to suffer. Every provider out there would rather give you two channels each with half the quality than give you one at full quality.

I'm pretty convinced we're never going to see full quality HD except for the major networks with an antenna hanging off our house. As they find more ways to increase the bandwidth available to deliver to our house, they'll just start converting more channels to HD for no particular reason and using up the available bandwidth. Case in point, DirecTV. When they busted out on the scene they had the best picture quality available. They increased capacity by throwing up more satellites, but added more channels at an even faster rate, resulting in some of the crappiest picture quality out there. Now we're watching the same thing happen with their hd-lite.

It'll be pretty amusing to see all the garbage that moves over to HD. After all, the only thing thats kept me from buying a ronco food dehydrator all these years is that turkey jerky in SD is just way too blurry.[/QUOTE]


Yes, i know it's the source and that's why i'm pissed. I pay over $120 a month for cable (Comcast) and plan on spending about $3000 on a plasma tv. But it doesn't seem to be enough to enjoy the experience if you're worrying about this happening. From what i hear *D* TV is even worse. I know SD has it's problems but i was expecting HD to be a different story.

[HallertauRogue]

[QUOTE=lipcrkr]Yes, i know it's the source and that's why i'm pissed. I pay over $120 a month for cable (Comcast) and plan on spending about $3000 on a plasma tv. But it doesn't seem to be enough to enjoy the experience if you're worrying about this happening. From what i hear *D* TV is even worse. I know SD has it's problems but i was expecting HD to be a different story.[/QUOTE]

What Comcast service area are you in? I have heard that different Comcast areas provide different signal quality.

When I was living in outside of Philly (Comcast's home) the HD channels were great and not as comrpessed as what you are explaining. I'm now now in a different service area, but still with Comcast. I JUST hooked up my plasma last night. I'll try to make a comparison between the Philly burb service and my new area.

[lipcrkr]

[QUOTE=HallertauRogue]What Comcast service area are you in? I have heard that different Comcast areas provide different signal quality.

When I was living in outside of Philly (Comcast's home) the HD channels were great and not as comrpessed as what you are explaining. I'm now now in a different service area, but still with Comcast. I JUST hooked up my plasma last night. I'll try to make a comparison between the Philly burb service and my new area.[/QUOTE]

I'm in La La Land.