Banding issues on a 46inch Sony Bravia

[fijidaddy]

Re: Banding issues on a 46inch Sony Bravia

Downloading HD 1080p trailers from my ps3, they all played clean and had absolutely no artifacts. I understand that for streamed HD this is understandable, but I am still hesitant to just settle for that.

To truly enjoy a full HD experience, and having the knowledge and the 'eye' to spot these artifacts, really does spoil it for me, since I would like a seamless experience.

I do like Vudu's achievements and product offering, but at the end of the day I still see what I see on my screen.

[Stan E]

Re: Banding issues on a 46inch Sony Bravia

New Vudu user here - also we are a Vudu retailer via our custom electronics installation business. This means that we have a demo Vudu at our showroom and I have a personal one at home.

I also have the "banding" issue at home, where the Vudu is feeding a Panasonic 42" ED plasma via component at 480p. As an example, we recently watched "The Last Mimsy" and the banding was very obvious on dark scenes, such as when the children were creeping through the government research building at night. To me the banding is very distracting, although I must say that the "normal" (read "bright") scenes in this movie were very good indeed, with natural looking color and lots of detail - easily comparable to a regular DVD.

I'm sure that this banding artifact is a by-product of the compression strategy used, although I feel that it is nevertheless a significant issue because a key attribute of superior picture quaity is deep blacks, combined with good shadow detail in dark scenes. The Vudu's visible banding basically compromises this.

[redwein]

Re: Banding issues on a 46inch Sony Bravia

This appears to be title specific. I have seen it on some movies but last night we watched "The Core" and I didn't see any noticeable artifacts, even though there were plenty of dark and low detail scenes.

[Stan E]

Re: Banding issues on a 46inch Sony Bravia

I agree that the banding is very likely to be title-specific and probably will also vary to some extent by end-user set up/display type as well. However it's something I have never seen like this on (standard Def.)DVD's (which I think needs to be the visual comparison benchmark for Vudu).