CDRLabs.com

Sony arranged to have some titles sent to me for the review, and as I went through them, I was surprised at how soft they looked compared with the best HD DVDs I’ve seen. The images simply didn’t “pop;” there was no “wow” factor as there was with HD DVD. I was left with the same impression watching them on a Samsung HL-S5687W 56-inch 1080p DLP RPTV and a Samsung SP-H710AE 720p DLP front projector.

What was going on here? I’ve seen a dozen dazzling Blu-ray demos over the past two years: This was not dazzling. “The Fifth Element,” “Terminator 2,” “House of Flying Daggers,” “Memento,” “Lord of War,” “Crash,” “UltraViolet;” all looked not much better than upconverted DVD. Not only that, “The Fifth Element” had obvious scratches and dirt from using a substandard print in the mastering process.

Don Eklund, executive vice president of advanced technologies at Sony Pictures, noticed that the player’s image did not match the quality of the master tapes from which the Blu-ray titles were encoded. He contacted Samsung, whose engineers determined that the noise-reduction circuit in the player’s Genesis scaler chip was enabled, causing the picture to soften significantly.

According to Jim Sanduski, senior vice president of marketing for Samsung’s Audio and Video Products Group, “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.”