[opendtv] Re: Fwd: Samsung admits to flaw in Blu-ray player [ANCHORDESK]

A more readable form for Freelists.org:

Samsung admits to flaw in Blu-ray player
http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6555414.html
Posted by: David Katzmaier
Post date: 7/20/2006

With regards to Blu-ray and HD-DVD: remember how we keep saying that 
first-generation technology has its share of bugs and that we expect things 
to improve in later generations? Well, it may happen sooner rather than 
later. The Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray player--which, although it delivered a 
pretty good picture, still exhibited softer image quality than we or anybody 
else expected--reportedly shipped with a faulty chip. The company's 
engineers blame the player's Genesis scaler chip, which apparently shipped 
with a noise-reduction feature turned on, which had the effect of softening 
the image.

The Perfect Vision reports that the flaw was first discovered by a Sony 
executive, who noticed that the Samsung player didn't measure up to the 
quality he'd seen on the master recordings. Samsung rep Jim Sandusky, as 
quoted in TPV, backed up the story: "Samsung is currently working to revise 
the default settings on the noise-reduction circuit in the Genesis scaler 
chip to sharpen the picture. All future Samsung BD-P1000 production will 
have this revision, and we are working to develop a firmware update for 
existing product." I have a call in to Samsung for an official comment and 
will update this entry if necessary.

Of course, Sony and other backers of Blu-ray obviously have every reason to 
curb the growing perception that their format has inferior image quality to 
HD-DVD. With that in mind, I take this news with another healthy grain of 
salt and eagerly await the next Blu-ray players from Sony itself--as well as 
Pioneer and Panasonic--to see if they're indeed better performers than the 
BD-P1000. Early reports from UltimateAV and The Digital Bits indicate that 
the Pioneer, at least, produces a sharper picture than the Samsung. I still 
have doubts that Blu-ray will match the image quality of HD-DVD, at least 
with Sony titles, mainly because Sony is still using MPEG-2 encoding, which 
is inferior to the VC-1 encoding used by HD-DVD. Video expert Joe Kane has 
already voiced his concerns over Sony's choice of encoding formats.

We expect to receive Samsung's firmware update when and if it becomes 
available and will test it ourselves here at CNET, then update our BD-P1000 
review accordingly. Speaking of updates, Toshiba has already issued a 
firmware update for its HD-A1 HD-DVD player, and we're in the process of 
updating our review of that unit, too. Isn't first-gen technology fun?



 
 
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