Video Asylum

Posted by Joe Murphy Jr (A) on April 04, 2008 at 00:45:20

I tended to some calibration duties on my display recently. The picture from the cable feed needed some adjustments, so I pulled out my GetGray calibration DVD and went to work on improving the image put forth by my display. Done with that (only a small improvement, after all the feed is from Charter Communications and turds don't polish all that well), I thought it might be a good idea to re-check the settings via the PS3 connection: glad I did. Holy shit! What happened?

Someone's been working late at SCEJ and it clearly shows. Previously, after numerous tests and back-n-forth comparisons, my DVD playback settings for the PS3 were to have it output 480p via HDMI (ie, no upscaling) and let my display, a 50" Panasonic 6UY, handle the scaling duties. Well, after the PS3's latest firmware update -- v2.20 -- that's no longer the case. From now on, the PS3 will be upscaling to 1080i and my display will take it from there (1366x768). The images I'm seeing from DVDs look like they're coming from a completely different player and that's no exaggeration. The improvement in the quality of the image is not subtle: anyone will be able to see it, the blind included (OK, slight exaggeraton).

Did this get any mention in the latest firmware update? No, none at all. Not a single word. The only part of the update that pertained to image quality was the addition of Mosquito Noise Reduction (which I currently have set to OFF -- OFF, 1, 2 and 3 are the menu options) in the video section. Below is a thread at AVS Forum which mentions the improvement in the PS3's image quality after the latest firmware update:

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