reesesWeb

I had been waiting for the Samsung HD-941 upscaling DVD player for months. Amazon had listed the release date always a month in the future, starting some time in April or May, possibly earlier.

Finally, this month, the status had changed to "Discontinued", and Samsung announced that they were not going to produce the HD-941. The HD-931 was available, but it lacked digital output (either HDMI or DVI), and owners were complaining of signal crush.

When I saw that LG had released an inexpensive upscaling DVD player with the Faroudja DCDi chip AND an HDMI output, I immediately ordered one from BestBuy.com. Other people were excited as well.

I knew that it didn't come with an HDMI cable (necessary for viewing DVDs in HD), but PCMall had one for $30, just about the least expensive on the web. Both of them arrived today and were waiting for me when I came home from the airport. Along with these were a few DVDs from Netflix, one of which was The Day After Tomorrow, a silly eco-thriller about Earth punishing us for our hubris with another ice age.

The good thing about science fiction & action movies is that they rely heavily upon special effects to impress viewers with stunning visuals. These are things that should be extra cool in HD, right?

Now, I know it's not "real" HD. The data just isn't there for the extra resolution. It makes up bits, and relies on some psychovisual calculations to trick us into seeing detail that doesn't exist in the source.

Believe me, it added a lot of detail I didn't see with my other DVD player.

Putting the DVD in the player, I worried that I'd snap the caddy off -- it feels even more fragile than the CD player on your laptop, assuming you have one with a drawer and not a slot. Be concerned about this if you have kids.

I took some photos with my craptastic Canon PowerShot S230, 3.2MP of 2002-era digital camera love. One of the pictures ended up with a moire effect that I didn't see on the screen, so I'll flag that. The picture looked bad enough that I don't need to give it any help.

These pictures are from a scene about 1:27 into the movie, set in a dark room in the NY Public Library. Since most sci-fi movies end up having a lot of low-lit scenes, low light performance is critical. That's why I bought the Panasonic plasma -- it has the best black levels of any of the mid-range PDPs.

The above picture is from my Sony DVP-NS725P in progressive scan mode, over component output. (Cheap Monster cables, if you really think that matters.) The Sony has a "block noise reduction" feature that may be contributing to the clean background.

Another shot of the same person in the same scene, from the LG DVB418 in 1080i mode. This is the moire-ful picture. While the half-lit shadow on her face is the same bluish tint as on the Sony, notice the "enhancement" of the mpeg artifacts to the left. This was happening throughout the entire film -- any regions of mostly solid color were very blotchy and twitchy as the Faroudja tried very hard to distinguish areas of varying color.

Here we (don't) see the back of a chair. This chair is facing the fireplace, the primary source of light in the scene. The back of the chair being away from the light, it's dark. Very dark. So dark you can see a reflection of me holding the camera.

Aiyee! My eyes!

I haven't seen other upscaling DVD players in action, and I have heard so many good things about the Faroudja chips that I am not comfortable saying that this is a general ailment with these players.

Normally, I would think that there was some setting on the DVD player that I needed to tweak. "Less aggressive subfield enhancement" would make me feel good. However, none of the menus such as "Display" or "Setup" offer this ability.

I was able to eliminate the artifacts by dropping the brightness on the tv to a really low value -- even "cinema" mode preset wasn't enough. According to an internet authority known as "Mr Poopies", the Sony probably doesn't pass "blacker-than-blacks", which would explain the uniform dark field. However, I need to run through more DVDs to see if I'm comfortable with this brightness level. I like a reasonably bright screen, and the earlier brightness setting is fine for pure HDTV input via HDMI (from my cable box).

Will I return this player? Not yet. One of the other very cool claimed features of this player is the ability to play DIVX videos on just about every optical media that has sold more than 100k players. DVD+-*R, CDR, etc., and 7 types of flash memory.

I have a bunch of Alias episodes recorded from OTA HD, and I'll copy one or two onto the SD card in my Treo and see how well it plays. If I don't see these weird compression artifacts, it may be worth keeping around just for playing stolen TV shows. (I own the DVD box sets, of course, so don't get your panties in a knot.)

Video/Audio Sync Issue

I did discover one other problem: the sound will get out of synch with the video if I hit "pause" while watching certain movies. Kat noticed it with "Ella Enchanted" and I noticed it with "Shrek 2". Maybe it's just lame pseudo-fantasy movies that I shouldn't be watching anyway. It happened with pause, which makes sense. Fast-forwarding or rewinding would flush the audio buffer and avoid the issue. Audio de-synch is incredibly frustrating, though, because it feels a little wrong until it's really, really wrong, and I second guess myself a bit. Watching in 1080i was the worst, but even 480p mode had problems keeping up.

I also noticed it with BBC DVDs, such as Coupling, Red Dwarf, etc. In fact, with Coupling, it forced me to watch characters' eyes instead of the rest of their faces while they were talking. Failing to do so would render me a bit nauseous.

Update

This firmware update dramatically ameliorates the issue. Not 100% better at 1080i, but definitely a 50-70% improvement. Burn the ISO to a disk (obviously) and slap it in the player. Follow the onscreen direction, and it'll look just like a VIC-20. After about five minutes (just about when you start looking for the cord to yank out to do a hard-reset) it'll reboot and your firmware will be upgraded.

Warning: After installing this firmware, you may find that you are unable to read certain region-encoded discs.

To resolve this issue, you can follow the directions mentioned here and download a region setting utility from here. If you burn it to CD and boot the LG with it, you'll see the following screen where you can set the region code.

If you like, and are offended by the whole idea of "region coding", setting it to zero will reportedly unlock all regions. Regardless, please be sure to exist.

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