During the first full week in December and after annoying delays, Sony finally began shipping its BDP-S1 Blu-ray Disc players to dealers.  As with initial HD DVD player shipments, the quantities were limited.  The particular establishment where I picked up mine received only five, and I snatched the very first one.  Considerably more expensive than my Toshiba HD-A1 HD DVD player, the Sony is arguably a textbook example of you-get-what-you-pay-for.

First Impressions

The Sony is substantially heavier than the Toshiba, perhaps hinting at a heftier power supply or a heavier chassis.  I don’t consider either an overriding advantage; I’ve lived with the Toshiba for months and the player produces lovely images, even in an area where power-line fluctuations are common.  The Sony has far better industrial design.  Photos can’t capture the attractively dramatic mirror finish panel in blue tinted glass that dominates the front of the player.  But that, too, is irrelevant in my case; during play, my equipment rack is hidden behind heavy velour drapes on a remote controlled motorized track.  What counts is performance and functionality.

Functionally, the Sony is nowhere near as peppy as my Denon DVD-9000 player, but it’s noticeably faster than my Toshiba HD-A1.  The Sony boots up faster and loads faster, but seems to lag a tad when commanded to do anything with its remote control.  The Sony outputs 1080p; my Toshiba does not.  The Sony offers the option of 1080p24 for temporal symmetry and the elimination of 3:2 pulldown artifacts; the Toshiba does not.  The Sony has a handy miniature phone plug on the back panel that accepts high-level signals from my IR distribution amplifier, eliminating the need for another IR emitter; the Toshiba does not.  The Sony will restart a high definition disc from the point at which it was stopped; the Toshiba will begin only at the beginning if play is interrupted.  The Sony has a bit rate indicator, a combination of bar graph and numerical display; the Toshiba does not.  The Sony will automatically power itself off if there is no activity for a moderate period of time; the Toshiba does not.  And Unlike HD DVDs, many Blu-ray Discs have video test signals available; just punch in 7669 on the remote control while the main menu is displayed.

I was surprised that Sony didn’t provide either a 1-meter HDMI cable or backlighting on its remote control.  Neither affect me very much (I use BetterCable interconnects and I’ll be transferring the Sony’s IR codes to my Marantz Universal Remote), but at the $1000 price point, it would have been nice for Sony to offer those features to its potential Blu-ray Disc player customers.  Neither my Sony nor my Toshiba player has an HDMI 1.3 output to carry lossless digitally compressed audio to an external decoder, although up to 7.1 channels of audio are available on the Sony’s HDMI 1.2 output connector.  (Sony has introduced a multi-channel home theater receiver specifically designed to accept that audio over HDMI.  And the $1000 second generation Toshiba will be equipped with HDMI 1.3.) 

Plugging In

I connected the Sony to my home theater system, sending its HDMI video through my BetterCables HDMI switcher to my Ruby front projector and the audio to my B&K decoder through six (5.1) analog connections.  Both Dolby Digital and DTS tracks are internally decoded and can be set to downmix to the analog linear pulse code modulation (LPCM) outputs; some Blu-ray discs offer uncompressed LPCM as an audio track option.  The initial setup is highly truncated, a subset of all the options that need to be set for proper operation.  The 24p option is a separate menu item, as opposed to listing it among other screen resolutions.  The audio requires special attention.  To take advantage of the analog outputs properly requires telling the player whether or not you have a center front speaker and whether you have large speakers (full-range) or small speakers (satellites and a subwoofer).  You have the options of specifying that compressed digital tracks are converted to LPCM and that the output should be in the 5.1 format as opposed to the default 2.0.  There are many details that the owner’s manual will guide the user through; I’ll not bore you with all.  I’ll just mention that it would be prudent to work your way through each option screen to get it right.

Getting Down To Business

For a limited time, the Sony player comes with a little bonus, the Blu-ray Disc release of The Fifth Element.  I found this a rather odd choice.  This particular disc is single layer; just like it did with reverse-spiral dual-layer DVDs in ’97, it took a while for Blu-ray dual-layer production problems to be sorted out.  So Sony was limited to only 25 GB of available space, 5 GB less than readily available dual-layer HD DVDs.  Under the circumstances, one might expect that a very efficient CODEC would be used to compress the video.  Nope.  Sony only had MPEG-2 compression tools available, and that CODEC is the least efficient of the three available.  For the same apparent visual quality, both VC-1 and AVC will produce smaller file sizes than MPEG-2.  Furthermore, a substantial chunk of the bit budget had to be set aside for this disc’s uncompressed LPCM audio track.  It is entirely possible that Sony had to reduce the high frequency visual content by low-pass filtering the high definition video to accommodate the limitations of space on this disc.  The result is a slightly soft presentation, certainly not demo quality.  (And there are a few visible specks of dirt that run through the film; the transfer print is not pristine.  This came as another surprise.) 

However, I found the presentation to be far, far better than The Fifth Element’s Superbit DVD release.  There is clearly more visual detail and I can now watch The Fifth Element without annoying edge halos.  (The only hints I saw as I sampled the disc came during the concert; the vertical members of the window frame behind the stage has subtle hints of halos, but were hard to see.  I had to look for them.)  Colors are more vivid.  Leeloo’s odd, orange and blond hair takes on clearly defined details missing from all previous SD releases.  Admittedly, finely grained textures, like the weave of Leeloo’s shorty sweater tee, are not as well defined as fabric weaves I’ve seen on many high definition discs, but the vehement criticism of this disc found on the Web is highly exaggerated.  As regular readers know, I watch my content on an eight-foot wide StudioTek 130 screen illuminated by a Sony VPL-VW100 Ruby Front projector in full 1080p resolution and with no color wheel artifacts.  My viewing angle is about 42 degrees.  My windowless home theater has no ambient lighting.  It is a very revealing environment, and I simply didn’t find the disc that offensive.  I’ve experienced softer HD DVDs.  Perhaps excessively high expectations colored the negative comments.

More troubling, I was immediately struck by an audio imbalance among my six satellites and subwoofer.  Out came my copy of Digital Video Essentials (DVE) with its 6.1 random noise tracks and my AudioControl Model SA-3050A Third-Octave Band Analyzer for use in the sound pressure level (SPL) mode.  Using the B&K’s internal band-limited pink noise signals, I found the speaker levels to be identical with less than 1 dB error.  But when I played similar bands from the DVE DVD, the left and right surrounds were too high and both the center surround and the subwoofer were too low.  I was relieved to hear that the B&K was dematrixing the center surround (precluding the need to break out my trusty old Shure Pro-Logic decoder for pseudo-EX dematrixing), but I could not understand why the channel balance was so far off.  I have to assume that the errors are being made within the Sony player.  Fortunately, this is a problem easily solved.  My B&K decoder allows for setting custom levels for each input.  A few dB here and there and balance was restored.

I reloaded The Fifth Element and the audio was much improved, although I’m still not completely convinced that the bottom end is quite right.  It doesn’t seem as robust as I’m used to in my theater.  More experimentation will be required, perhaps comparing LPCM with external decoding of a digital audio bit stream.  And I certainly need more experience with a variety of Blu-ray Discs.  Regardless, I was impressed with the visual color depth and fidelity, but as I paid closer attention, I found more problems.  The most egregious is white bloom.  The opening titles are plain white text against predominantly dark backgrounds.  Each credit fades in and fads out.  As the lettering approaches full brightness, they fatten and their edges become jagged.  Only slightly below full letter brightness do the letters seem properly shaped.  And in the sequence when Leeloo’s surviving hand is wheeled down a laboratory corridor, one or two pink rods pass in front of bright ceiling light fixtures; the rods narrow as the white blooms into their space.  It was time to switch to another Blu-ray Disc and another studio.  I intentionally stayed with the same CODEC and another single-layered disc.  I wanted to understand if the problems I was seeing are due to mastering or compression or if there is an inherent flaw in using an inefficient CODEC on a 25 GB disc.

I selected Fox’s The Fantastic Four, and the results were far different.  The white bloom is gone.  The softness is gone.  The only complaint I have is that primary reds lean ever so slightly toward blue; this is most apparent in the color of the fire engine on the bridge.  (And, independent of the quality of the compression and transfer, the print appears to be pristine.)  The Fifth Element runs 126 minutes and The Fantastic Four is only 106 minutes.  The Fifth Element’s bit rate peaks roughly at 27 Mbps; The Fantastic Four peaks at roughly 37 Mbps.  The Sony disc had to dedicate a substantial portion of the bit budget to 5.1 LPCM audio; the Fox disc features a terrific DTS-HD 5.1 lossless audio track.  I suspect it’s the last characteristic that caused the Sony disc to have disappointing visuals.  The Fantastic Four drew me in with its wonderfully detailed images and the clarity of its audio track.  I’m impressed.  (But I’m still not confident that the bottom most audio octave is being reproduced properly.)

DVD Performance

Since the Sony player is backward compatible with DVD, its ability to properly display that format is important as well.  I have some good news and some bad news.

I was very disappointed that the Toshiba HD-A1 would not properly display non-anamorphic widescreen DVDs properly.  It simultaneously letterboxed and windowpaned, making the image quite small.  That is not the case with the Sony.  I loaded my old non-anamorphic widescreen DVD of The Rocketeer, a fun film desperately in need of a new edition.  (Hey, Buena Vista, how about a great high definition Blu-ray Disc release?)  In its default mode, the player automatically detected the presence of a non-anamorphic widescreen DVD and magnified the image appropriately to completely fill the screen’s width while maintaining the image in proper proportion.  I then loaded Warner’s DVD of Casablanca.  The Sony player again correctly detected the film’s aspect ratio.  This time, the screen’s height was filled and proportions were maintained.  Bravo Sony.

Next, I wanted to judge the quality of the Sony’s internal scaler while playing anamorphic DVDs.  I loaded a reference DVD, Star Wars Episode II, and I found that the images weren’t quite up to my expectations.  I pulled The Avia Guide to Home Theater DVD off the shelf, loaded it into the Sony, and brought up the advanced video test patterns.  I examined video wedges on the anamorphic and non-anamorphic resolution test patterns.  I then repeated that visual test with the Toshiba HD-A1.  I can write without hesitation that Toshiba has implemented a better scaler algorithm.  The video wedges were displayed with higher bandwidth (higher number of video line-pairs) from the Toshiba than from the Sony.  I will have to investigate further to see if some user definable parameter affects the Sony scaler’s resolution.

This may also be an appropriate time to mention that the Toshiba has yet another flaw that the Sony does not.  The Avia Guide to Home Theater DVD is organized in multiple levels of menus and submenus that eventually guide the user to the test pattern of interest.  As the user navigates with the remote control’s cursor keys, moving through the menu items, the choices change color to indicate which is currently selected.  As I performed this navigation with the Toshiba, about three or four menu levels in, the player stopped highlighting menu choices.  There were no visual indications of which menu item was active.  I had to count horizontal and vertical cursor keystrokes to navigate; this was utterly inconvenient at best and I lost my place at worst.  When the navigation failed, I frequently had to start over from the Top Menu.  The Sony, on the other hand, maintained visual indications of active menu items all the way down to the deepest menu.

So far, each player seems to have its strengths and weaknesses.  But as I discover more and more, possibly finding workarounds for the problems I’ve found, I’ll be sure to pass them along to you.

DVD Video Performance Clarification

I discovered that during initial setup I had inadvertently set the Sony player for 1080i output when I had intended to set it for 1080p.  Since that setting is available in the guided setup and it’s not an option on the video settings screen, it escaped my attention.  But I’ve been investigating the cause of the bass management problems I’m having with both the HD DVD and the Blu-ray disc players and as part of that process I stumbled upon my error.

You’ll recall that film is usually stored on discs in a 24 frames per second progressive video form to save space.  It’s processed internal to the player to produce interlaced video at the request of the user (first generation DVD players and first generation HD DVD players can only produce interlaced video).  I found that the Sony’s internal video processing required to generate interlaced video fields affects the resolution.

When I originally compared the Toshiba HD-A1 and the Sony BDP-S1, each was producing video in the 1080i format.  I wrote that the Toshiba appeared slightly sharper and the resolution wedges on a test DVD bore that out.  But when I switched the Sony to 1080p output and repeated the comparison, I found the resolution wedges to appear precisely the same from both players.

That still gives the Toshiba a slight edge when viewing standard definition DVDs scaled up to 1080 lines for those who own displays incapable of accepting 1080p.  But the current trend in displays is to provide 1080p input capability, so for those replacing their older displays with new, the Toshiba’s scaling advantage evaporates.

Moving On - As Opposed To Final Thoughts

I’ll now begin to review a substantial number of Blu-ray Discs (some of my above comments are culled from two such reviews).  I’ll continue to investigate the Sony Blu-ray Disc player’s performance and fine-tune the integration of the player into my home theater system.  I’m particularly looking forward to reviewing a few dual-layer Blu-ray releases compressed with advanced CODECs to fully appreciate the capabilities of the format.  For now, I don’t feel that I have enough experience to be able to offer you an informed opinion of a definitive preference between the competing formats.  That will have to wait for another essay.