Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems The one of MANY HD-DVD threads (No bashing Blu-Ray)

He aims, he shoots, he scores! The crowd goes wild!

Hehe But seriously, I'm not. As far as I know, nobody on this board knows me personally, except perhaps for any UK M staff lurkers, but I use the same name on AVSForum and AVForum and a number of people there do know me personally and can vouch for my independent status

Mark

VK, excellent post - thanks for taking the time to share your experiences.

Couldn't agree more about taking 1080i down to 720p and still looking great - you are seeing the real detail and cleanliness of the transfer rather than upscaled SD mpeg artefacts. I am confidently guessing this could be taken even further and that a 1080i HD-DVD downscaled to 480i would still look better than the SD version for the same reasons.

Having said that, the Toshiba's downscaling, as you have found, is known to be poor so you'd want a better device to take it's 1080i signal and downscale for this to work well.

Cheers,

Mark

I don't doubt this either, and it has in fact given me cause, as someone who has yet to find and be able to spend money on an HDTV that I like, to consider the XE1 player and view 480i for the time being.

Whether I do this or not would greatly depend on the XE1s ability to offer a region hack for DVD playback as Toshiba reps have hinted will eventually leak, and whether the price can come down just a little bit (though I am awaiting definitive confirmation on a price). Toshiba finally today confirmed the reports that the XE1 (the European name of the XA2 for those confused) uses Silicon Optix's Reon chip for scaling and deinterlacing duties which I think combined with it's 1080p support and HDMI 1.3 output makes it a very comprehensive player indeed, let down only by its lack of DVD-A support.

A good fellow from Value Electronics, Robert Zohn, who posts on AVS a lot and is a first class Toshiba dealer in the US is shipping his XA2 stock to customers next week and he has confirmed the XA2/XE1 will be offering 24p output via firmware update by the end of February stating that Toshiba will announce this update at CES next week.

Incidentally, Robert will be joining Amir from Microsoft in a panel debate entitled "HD DVD vs Bluray: And the Winner is…' at CES on Monday. Steve Nickerson from Warner and Andy Parsons from Pioneer will also be on the panel, as will Ben Keen from Screen Digest.

Do you know if there is any possibility that the XA1 will get a 24p firmware update?

I don't believe that it is going to, no. I'm not even sure it or the A1 is able to offer something like that.

The new A2/E1 in terms of the way it handles the video side of things is much the same as the two first gen players and the 24p update is only apparently coming for the XA2/XE1. Whether what it will do is take 24p directly from the encode or take 24p, convert it to 1080i/60 then back to 24p or not I don't know. I'd suspect the latter, but if implemented right that approach shouldn't cause a problem.

We should get definitive answers next week.

The XA1 not doing 24p is not really an issue if you have a scaler capable of deinterlacing film correctly from 60i like the Lumagen can for instance as you will get the same resulting image, *unless* the XA1 is degrading the 60i output in some way as it converts it from native 24p to 60i for output.

Just trying to get away without a scaler for the time being Mark...

Silicon Optix HQV video processing adopted for the Toshiba HD-XA2 here .

I noticed no degradation when outputting 1080i 60 to the Ruby via HDMI (no scaler until it got to the Ruby which deinterlaced to 1080p 48hz); although I didn't look for motion artifacts very close...

ken

If the Sony can deinterlace 1080i film correctly then there will be no degradation. Film deinterlacing is relatively easy to do and the results are a perfect copy of the progressive image stored on the disc, but video is a different matter as it's almost impossible to deinterlace perfectly and so a pure progressive feed from the player would be the best way to go here.

Mark

Watching The Last Samurai - very nice improvement over the DVD but not quite reference quality. Some scenes though are stunning- the scene with the cheery blossoms is really stunning.

Mark- thank you again.

Anyone (Ken?) want a copy of Full Metal Jacket? This time I ordered a 2nd copy by mistake and Id rather it go to someone here than make the effort to send it back to Amazon... let me know.

best regards,
Jerry