We had a Panasonic player with a copy of Click so after the HD DVD insider meeting finished, a few of us popped in Click. The display being used is the new Pioneer 1080p Plasma which was calibrated for the event. I know you own this display Plazman so this should be very applicable to your situation.

So what was our reaction? This is going to sound super biased so take it however you like. But the picture on Click was very disappointing. The image is riddled with noise. Especially bad was to see all the noise in the flesh tones. But really, there was noise everywhere. On the surface of everything. In bright scenes and darker scenes. Hard to imagine this comes from a digital camera. Even bright scenes suffered from healthy amount of noise that was detracting from the image. I see that the reviews have noted this but I don't think they gave this enough of a mention. The image is not reference material. Note that a few of the other AVS Forum members where there and we all had the same reaction.

Prior to this, we had played a number of HD DVDs including Corpse, Tokyo Drift, etc. and they look wonderful on this plasma. Yes, there is a bit of low level noise on these type of displays but that was well below what we saw on Click.

Now, I can think of two reasons why we saw more of a problem here. Maybe the reviewers are using the Samsung and it does have some kind of noise reduction going on. But perhaps the other reason is the fact that we were driving the Plasma that had 1080p resolution, and we had it in 1:1 pixel mapping. Note that without setting 1:1, the images is softer and does not resolve full 1080p.

Then there was another disturbing problem. On camera pans, such as one outside, showed detail like the lawn turning into mush and as soon as the motion stopped, the resolution popped back up. Since we had a Plasma, I can't blame the display's response time. I suppose it is possible the sensor in the original camera had low response time but it still was not nice to see what is typical of a temporal filter in an MPEG-2 encoder.

In fairness, we did not watch the whole movie. We just watched parts of it but the noise was a constant factor in all the material that we watched.

I can think of large number of HD DVD titles that outperform this one. Even the HD DVD-15 combo titles easily outperform it based on what I saw. Firewall and other titles like it look far, far cleaner despite being half the size. Not only is the picture noisy, but it has busy disturbing look to the noise that really makes your eye focus on it. The only explanation I can think of is too low of an average rate for the MPEG-2 encode but given the numbers mentioned here, that should not make it look this bad.

Kudos are definitely in order for them showing that they can make BD-50 discs. This is certainly a major accomplishment for them and a positive PR point. But until they get their act together in creating stunning quality, they don't deserve any kudos on the actual Video experience.

Let me say again that you should feel free to dismiss my posting as being biased. As such, I encourage those of you with good displays, to give this title a try and post your experience here.