480i Resolution DVDs

Just by literal definition:

PAL - Wikipedia

NTSC is the American standard.

 

Beat me to it.

 

The Americans need to get with the program. Though I imagine it's all moot at this point.

 

The French had their own thing, too, apparently also adopted by the Soviets.

This is why HD is king.

 

PAL may have higher resolution but sadly suffers from the dreaded PAL speed-up issue (converting 29.97fps to 25fps). Not an issue if converted well but what tends to happen is the audio is not pitch corrected so sounds wrong.

Basically both are flawed formats.

What I find really bizarre is how the US still sells equipment that can't play PAL (or anything at 25fps). Most of Europe has been able to play 24fps and 29.97fps for years now.

 

I would be willing to bet you received a bootleg disc, like you see the street vendors selling on the corners in NYC. Someone sits in a movie theater with a video recorder, and the result gets pressed onto the cheapest possible DVDs. Throw them in cheap boxes with photocopies of the legit product packaging, and you've got something to sell all over the world.

Amazon would never knowingly sell a bootleg, but that doesn't mean they don't have them in their distribution centers. Send it back with an explanation, and you should get an immediate refund.

 

Ah yes I grew up with SECAM, and was quite surprised at the difference in colour with PAL and NTSC. PAL seemed to have a yellow-green bias, and NTSC a red-magenta bias to my young eyes. Resolution-wise it seemed to me to fall between PAL and NTSC, PAL being the sharpest.

What a relief digital HD was!

 

The really weird thing is how widescreen content is handled on DVDs. It's stored anamorphically - that is, squashed to fit inside a 4:3 frame, and then expanded out to fit a 16:9 television.

Back in 1996 when the spec was defined, 99% of TVs were 4:3, so this approach made sense. Now it's an anachronism.

 

That is weird. I also have a Sony X800 player as our second 4K machine, and it's been fine. How they could screw it up, I dunno.

This review of the Blu-ray is fairly positive:

DVD Talk

That is not true in my experience. I'm guessing I mastered more than 1000 titles to PAL and NTSC over the years, and they looked the same to me. In a closed-circuit situation, the resolution doesn't really change. If anything, the PAL looked worse because of the 25fps flicker. And they were absolutely identical in terms of color. If you saw a difference, it's because the monitor wasn't calibrated correctly. We actually used EBU phosphors in the mastering room CRTs, because Europe "had" a standard and America did not, so if anything, the screens were optimized more for PAL than NTSC. But that was the standard way of doing things in post in the 1980s and 1990s.

NTSC, PAL, and SECAM mainly had differences in transmission (analog over the air). That stopped being an issue once everybody switched to digital transmission, streaming, satellite, and all that stuff. This happened more than 10 years ago in America:

Digital television transition - Wikipedia

 

The only sharpening adjustments one should make on the TV set are to turn off sharpening. Picture quality almost never increases with sharpening.

 

All kinds of fake items are sold on Amazon. It looks like you were hosed.

 

This is from 2010, so no 4kHD here....

Hi Fi Writer - VHS vs DVD vs Blu-ray

 

Man, I'm talking about watching VHS played on a cheap VCR on a cheap consumer-grade un-calibrated tiny CRT television through cheap SCART cables as a kid in France, or catching TV programs in Britain and the US, more than 20 years ago. No wonder my experience was different than yours!
These were just my observations experimenting with video at home as a young kid in the 90s.

 

Got my money back plus appropriate credit for the 3-for-2 sale (a discounted book and Zappa LP). In effect, the Blu-ray replacement cost me about $6.

The moral of the story is don’t except shoddy merchandise, even if the flaws are accidental. I wonder how many people just watched a similarly flawed DVD not fully realizing the problem or just accepting the poor quality.

 

Speak for yourself. The Wizard Of Oz scarecrow comparison I posted up thread between the BD screen grab verses the photo I took of my eyeball calibrated Samsung has the sharpening cranked up on my Samsung, otherwise it would look as soft edged as the screen grab.

It's kinda' like audio mastering where they deliver a flat sort of soft response that takes into account non-linear ramping of highs going too hot when cranking it up on a wide range of playback systems and also to tap down the tape hiss, in this case with 1938 film to tap down the film grain which you can see is quite pronounced on my Samsung after increasing sharpness.

And by the way I don't have to do this on all discs both DVD and Blu-ray most of which are sharp enough.

 

Does the Richard Jewell Blu-ray look correct and sharp enough without adjustments?

 

Just got it today. I’ll let you know.

 

You can turn off sharpening? I thought it was just adjusting it up and down.

 

Don't assume that you were seeing PAL or SECAM or NTSC at its best. We were watching in million-dollar post rooms in Hollywood, and trust me, there is no difference. As I said, if anything, PAL and SECAM looked worse because of the 25fps flicker.

Remember, you're the one who said "...I was quite surprised at the difference in colour with PAL and NTSC. PAL seemed to have a yellow-green bias, and NTSC a red-magenta bias to my young eyes. Resolution-wise it seemed to me to fall between PAL and NTSC, PAL being the sharpest." And this is just not true. We could measure it on scopes and we could see it on broadcast monitors. At home on broadcast TV... god knows what you're seeing.

 

The only problem is I'm guessing a lot of older TV shows will never be put out on Blu Ray.

 

I have a zero to 50 sharpening adjustment range on my Samsung HDtv. The distance one sits from the screen should determine the level of sharpness. There's no way to know what additional processing is going on starting from the player into the internal processing of the display that might be affecting the default sharpness setting. Each brand and model of tv will most likely be different.

Let your eyes be the judge as to what's best. I'm actually now using my HDtv to test my aging eyesight and how far I need to sit from the display and whether I need to wear my reading glasses which lately I'm now having to do.

I used to be able to sit 7 feet from my 32in. display with sharpness at what I perceive is adequate but now find I have to wear my reading glasses or sit farther away which starts to provide diminishing returns on the level of perceived detail. Reading glasses win.

 

Probably just a bad transfer. DVDs, blu-rays and 4k UHD are just formats. The format pretty much dictates the limits of the presentation. How the title looks on the format is up to how the company does the transfer, just like CDs and sound: they can be mastered well full with nice dynamic range or be brickwalled or have bad EQ. As good or bad as they are they're still all CDs. How good it comes out is up to QC.

 

See: I Love Lucy after season 2. *sigh*

 

The 25fps flicker effect you experienced in the United States is the result of watching a non-native (to you) PAL or SECAM signal on equipment (no matter how expensive) designed to run on the U.S. 60 Hz electrical system.

@Plan9 is talking about watching a VHS, in SECAM format, in his native France, where the electrical system has a cycle rate of 50 Hz. In such circumstances, his VCR and television were in alignment with the country’s electrical system, so there would have been no flicker effect at all.

I grew up in Britain, where there was no flicker effect when playing back a PAL signal on a PAL VCR into a PAL television, at 50 Hz. The problem only arose when you tried to cross the format streams.

To give you another example, SECAM VHS tapes, when played back on a PAL-standard VCR would have a black and white picture. This wasn’t a fault with the SECAM system, which played back perfectly fine, in colour, on French systems. The problem was the result of me mixing formats that weren’t designed to be compatible.

 

Not every second of every movie is supposed to be sharp. Cranking up TV sharpness is part of the problem, not of the solution.

Just no.