HELP HD shows look better than blu ray?

Question

I have a Samsung 32in LCD HDTV hooked up to a PS3 via HDMI cable, settings on 1080i and also switced to 720, and still for some reason two of the blu ray movies I have look like a dvd why/?, also they are in widescreen ,why are they not filling up the whole tv the PS3 did upscale the dvds, and why when I watch HD shows like Smallville or Supernatral they actually look better than the blu ray movies? Thanks in advance

Answer 1

From reading this, it appears that you are just playing regular DVD's and you think that the PS3 upscaling will make it appear like HD.

This is wrong.  Eve n though the DVD is upscaled it still is only 480 progressive lines while HD is either 720 progressive scanned lines or 1080 interlaced lines (which always looks better than regualr DVD.

Upscaling a DVD is never HD quality and never will be and people for some reason think that it is.  You need to buy specific Bluray discs for the higher quality picture.

Now there is a caveat with this though.  Some movies that were early releases of Bluray looked horrible and even DVD looked better.  Bluray has improved vastly since those early movies.  You would want to look at any Disney Bluray or Pixar animated Bluray movie to really see how great Bluray can look.  Another good comparison is to look at 2001 a Space Odyssey on DVD and Bluray and you will see how good Bluray can look.

Also widscreen movies will not fill up the entire screen because the directors making these movies have many options on aspect ratios to film in.  Whatever the director chose is how wide the black bars on top and bottom will be.  Animated movies like "Cars" will have no black bars because it is computer generated, but some movies are shot in 70 mm widescreen and those will have huge black bars.

When you watch a movie on HD the reason you don't see black bars is because the station broadcasters are resizing the image before broadcast so that you get full screen images.  The problem with resizing the picture is the larger you make the image to fill the entire screen, you lose some of the picture on the right and left side of the screen.

They are many movies that rival picture quality over broadcast HD, but then again there are some movies that look alot worse.  Warner Bros movies are an example of horrible transfers while Disney makes the effort to clean up the image as much as possible to give you just jaw dropping picture quality.

One more thing you should always set the Bluray player and HD cable/sat box to the TV's native resolution.  So if the TV is 720p set the PS3 and HD box to that resolution.  If 1080i then do that, this way the player and the TV are both not scaling the image which can also lead to a slightly worse picture than just having the player or cablebox do the scaling.

Answer 2

Blue Ray quality varies from movie to movie and even from scene to scene. Do not expect all Blue Ray movies to look great. No movie camera is used to film in HD 1080p format. Movies must be converted to Blue Ray formats. The quality of a Blue Ray DVD depends upon the quality of the encoder equipment used to convert a movie to Blue Ray format. Also, it depends upon the experience of the post-production crew, their time and budget.

Movies will appear in wide screen mode because they are filmed for the wider aspect ratio of movie theater screens. Try using the P-Size button on your Samsung remote to zoom the picture to full screen (though you will lose some of the picture off the sides of your TV).