Why Doesn't Blu Ray Look Good?

[hogger129]

Hello,

Please let me know if this question belongs under a different part of the forum.

Anyway, I bought Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade Blu-ray. It looks awesome played on my PS3 to my Samsung 24" LED 1080p monitor. But when I play this on my parents' Sony BDP-S470 hooked up to a 42" Plasma TV, it looks like crap. All the grain is gone and it just looks like a poopy HDTV broadcast.

What happened?

I'm pretty sure my parents' TV is 1080p, but not sure, could be 720p. I would still think the picture would retain the grain on the Blu-ray and show off the fine detail like my Samsung monitor does. But for some reason it doesn't. It's like it removes all the grain, kind of looks like a bad HDTV broadcast. That kind of defeats the entire purpose of buying Blu-ray doesn't it?

Can you guys help?

Thanks.

[DB83]

Depends, I suppose what you mean by 'grain'

Do you mean 'noise'. Different players/TV's will have methods of reducing that. Some could well overdo it so that a picture becomes too soft. Check the settings of both player and the tv.

[poisondeathray]

How is the BD player hooked up to the TV ?

Some TV's have postprocessing enabled, and/or motion interpolation functions. Go into the display settings and disble all of those.

But if it is a 720p display, there is nothing you can do about that short of getting an ew display

[Skiller]

It's because your parent's TV has all those detail-destoying features turned on that make the picture look artificial and processed to death.

Turn off all the noise reduction settings, usually there is more than one. For example one may be called just "DNR" and another one may be called "MPEG DNR" or the like.
I have yet to see a scenario where these actually do any good to the picture. I mean if you're watching analog TV and have a rather bad reception with noise, a light setting of DNR might be a good idea, but other than that any noise present that is not related to digital lossy compression on Blu-ray and DVD is almost always simply intentional and therefore I don't see a point in getting rid of it – considering the cost at which it comes.

[fritzi93]

The transfer/encode of The Last Crusade is quite good, so it comes down to two things already mentioned:

1) How the player is hooked up to the TV. And it wouldn't hurt to check the player's setting to see what it's outputting.

2) The TV. A lot of 42" plasmas more than 7 years old are only nominally 720p. The native resolution may very well be 1024x768.
Plus, no doubt the TV is not calibrated, even roughly. DNR is probably on, and the TV may even still be in showfloor vivid mode.

[theewizard]

for 'grain' do you mean PIXEL sharpness
that is something NOT to expect on a Plasma TV especially if it is an older model
in many ways plasma is more like many miniature CRT tubes, NOT individual pixels in and LCD display
you can make adjustments, but it will nevver match your Monitor for Crispness and sharp edges

[TimA-C]

If the TV is as it was when bought then you may find that as well as all "aids" being turned on, the brightness, colour and contrast may also be set too high. If there are any picture settings profiles already predefined in the TV's Settings Menu, then you may want to try some of those to see if you get better results - the movie ones are often a good place to start.

[newpball]

a poopy HDTV broadcast.

Haha, got to remember that one!

[hogger129]

for 'grain' do you mean PIXEL sharpness
that is something NOT to expect on a Plasma TV especially if it is an older model
in many ways plasma is more like many miniature CRT tubes, NOT individual pixels in and LCD display
you can make adjustments, but it will nevver match your Monitor for Crispness and sharp edges

Yes, thank you, this is EXACTLY what I mean... It is an older plasma. So basically an LED TV is going to beat both a plasma and LCD if I am understanding correctly?

[hogger129]

It's because your parent's TV has all those detail-destoying features turned on that make the picture look artificial and processed to death.

Turn off all the noise reduction settings, usually there is more than one. For example one may be called just "DNR" and another one may be called "MPEG DNR" or the like.
I have yet to see a scenario where these actually do any good to the picture. I mean if you're watching analog TV and have a rather bad reception with noise, a light setting of DNR might be a good idea, but other than that any noise present that is not related to digital lossy compression on Blu-ray and DVD is almost always simply intentional and therefore I don't see a point in getting rid of it – considering the cost at which it comes.

I will try making some of these adjustments because yes it is like you say, looks like all the sharpness and grain is removed from the picture like it's way overprocessed.

[theewizard]

just to clarify
there are NO LED monitors or TVs, that i am aware of
what is called and LED monitor, is an LCD display with LED's for the back lighting (instead of CFL), almost all new production has the LED lighting mounted on the edge surrounding the LCD display and fiber optic "light pipes" to place the light behind the LCD, this provides for darker black more contrast and less bleed over lighting between contrasting areas of the picture, the monitor is LCD

[hogger129]

I thought it may help out if I posted what equipment I'm using. Source is a PS3 Slim playing Blu-ray discs. First display is a Toshiba 32AV502R. Apparently this is a 32" 720p LCD. My other display is a Samsung S24D590L which is 1080p "LED-Lit Monitor" (which I think was what 'theewizard' was saying) and has something called PLS technology, not sure what that means. Using the same source, same disc, my Samsung display still looks far and away better. Shows off the fine detail of the Blu-ray much better than the Toshiba does. Even with other discs such as The Terminator, the Criterion Collection version of Thief; that Samsung still looks better. I even tried shutting off all the special settings on both monitors (basically just did a reset). Maybe 720p just looks that bad compared to 1080 which I didn't always think was that noticeable of a difference.

[theewizard]

several factors involved
the main one being that
unless the PS3 has a 720p down convert setting, it is outputing 1080 signal which the TV must down down convert
check your PS3 for a an output setting, and change it IF available
the TV trying to display a 1080 line signal on a 720 line display is definitely going to take a quality hit
moving to a larger TV while going down in display resolution, 'magnifies' that difference in resolution
and then you have the difference in the display characteristics of LCD vs Plasma