I spent yesterday going through my small collection of Blu-Ray films with my new Sony BDP-S1. Not one of them came close to the average picture quality that we are seeing with HD-DVD.

The encoding was generally clean and there was a pleasing absence of the typical MPEG2 artefacts, though on a number of discs the FBI warning was a mess of i-frame pulsing (but that's nitpicking as it's the main feature I am interested in, but it does leave one a little concerned about what to expect). I did notice some macro blocking and aliasing in Ultraviolet. But as I say, generally the films were pretty clear of artefacts. The only artefacts I see while watching HD-DVD are attributable to my DLP projector.

But my main feeling with the films was that they never look as sharp or detailed as HD-DVD and so every film feels soft - it's almost like the Blu-Ray films are not encoding the full resolution in order to make the most of the bitrate they have... There is also a kind of artificiality with most of the titles - HD-DVD can look very smooth and filmic but Blu-Ray seems to be a level back from that.

Today I'll see if I have any D-Theater titles which I also have on Blu-Ray and see how the higher bit-rate of the tapes stacks up.

The player itself is very nice though - quick startup times and discs play quickly. Biggest downside for me is no RS232 control so now I have to build up the remote codes for my Crestron system.

If I had not seen HD-DVD then I suspect I would have been happier with Blu-Ray, but I have, and so now I am spoiled. This makes me even more concerned about the format war, because if Blu-Ray wins without being forced to improve their image quality then we all lose...

I've ordered a couple of the VC-1 releases to see how they look. I suspect this should raise Blu-Ray's image quality to that of HD-DVD but until we see all releases using the newer codecs my image quality ratings are as follows:

HD-DVD: 10/10
Blu-Ray: 7/10

Cheers,

Mark

My Music : My Cinema