when you saw the number one canadian tech tuber using subpar equipment to
watch talk to your digital content you got angry you raked us across the kohl's
for watching ultra high definition blu-rays
on an xbox and we saw your feedback but
it hurt and we needed some time to recover and also we're not just going to take
your word for it that a proper blu-ray player will perform so much better
reading digital ones and zeros off of a plastic film disc
so we need to test these claims to find out is there something to the hype or is
this yet another snake oil high five
rabbit hole can the average person spot the difference
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Linus
you were technically correct which is the best kind of correct however and
this is a really big however you guys while a standalone blu-ray player does
have advantages over throwing your favorite film into your xbox i'm not
personally expecting to be able to tell which image i got for free with my halo
machine and which one came out of a 500
panasonic dp ub 820 pck our premium 4k
HDR blu-ray player that has features like a precise chroma hdx processor
dolby vision and 192 kilohertz 32-bit
audio support for our side-by-side then we're using the only tv that we have two
of the lg OLED g1 and of course we don't
have stands for them so you'll have to forgive our rudimentary setup back here both are in
filmmaker mode with stupid features like motion clarity turned off and
i still don't know which one is which so i'm gonna go try and figure it out now
turn around
i think it's the right one there's oh
no it's fine there just there was a bit more green in the foliage behind the car
that was the only thing i was i was i was looking for a better color or
something but that's not the whole story
basically when we look at an image on a screen we see colors being represented
by a set of numbers that your processor understands
when it comes to RGB the color space not the pretty lights in your computer we
are assigning different values to red green and blue if you've ever used any
RGB software or say photoshop you might be familiar with setting values for rg
and b anywhere from 0 to 255.
these then get mixed together to give you one of nearly 17 million different
colors each with its own hex code when things are instead broken down into
ycbcr which is also often referred to as
ycc it gets a little more confusing
instead of red green and blue we have y
which is our luma or brightness component then cb is blue relative to
green and cr is red relative to green
so in a 4 4 4 image then we get an uncompressed signal that easily
translates to RGB but when we compress it to say
400 we keep the same luminance value
which defines the majority of the image's contrast and shapes but we lose
color data so you can see then this image is still clearly defined look at
me you can make out detail on my beard and face but you probably can't see the
exact color of my high quality insulated water bottle from lttstore.com so i
guess you'll just have to buy one and see it for yourself
scaling up to four to zero we get one quarter of the full four four four ycc
color space four two two nets us half of our full color space and for the most
part because we are much more sensitive to contrast than we are to color going
from 444 to 422 or even 420 isn't very
noticeable to the naked eye and is likely what you've been watching for
years now obviously if we were to take a 444 image and put it directly next to a
420 image and play spot the difference
you would find some but nothing anywhere close to say thinking someone was
wearing a red shirt instead of a green one or even a dark green shirt instead
of a light green shirt instead what you'll typically notice is
a much shorter gradient when colors mix and the primary reason that we do this
compression is because 444 uses a lot of
data so the 4k blu-rays behind me are
stored in a ycbcr42010bit format but we've got a
problem our panel is RGB
so to get there we typically take our
420 and we need to convert that to ycbcr444
then rgbfi that image now our panasonic blu-ray player handles
bit perfect 420 to 444 conversion but
our series x well it's actually doing an imperfect
conversion first to RGB then back to ycbcr to output to the
display this can and does result in errors but
as we saw they're extremely hard to spot even looking at two of the exact same
displays on the same frame of content so
if you're not a trained colorist good luck spotting the differences especially
with moving content on the screen and even for those folks the difference
between two panels rolling one after the other off the line even for a high
quality set like lg's OLED evo g1 here is probably greater than the difference
that we saw from our two sources meaning that unless you've spent actual time and
or money professionally calibrating your display
any concerns that you have about the chroma subsampling errors of your xbox
can be safely put to rest is that image technically correct
no but if i came in here without knowing anything about what was on these two tvs
i wouldn't be able to tell you which one is which think i'm lying
left is xbox right is blu-ray player uh
which one do i think is the xbox uh left
xbox is right
left writes the xbox i'm going left as xbox
they couldn't tell but we're not actually done yet not even
close for those of you who don't know HDR or
high dynamic range allows your display to show very dark and very bright images
on screen at the same time improving the perceived resolution and making the
content more lifelike and immersive and there are three major standards for HDR
at the time of filming HDR 10 HDR 10 plus and dolby vision HDR's 10 metadata
says okay we looked at the content here's the
brightest scene here's the darkest scene let's just throw the rest somewhere in
between with HDR 10 plus and dolby vision they use dynamic metadata to
apply tone mapping throughout the entirety of the content being displayed
making better effective use of the dynamic range of your panel
dolby vision and HDR plus are also typically brighter to the eye when
you're viewing them since they're mastered for displays that are capable
of a thousand to up to four thousand nits peak brightness while hdr10 can end
up anywhere from 400 to 4000
that's why most monitors you see are not 10 plus they often can't go much higher
than six or 700 nits let alone the thousand
that 10 plus is meant for HDR 10 also can't go past 10 bit color
depth and while very little content is at 12 bit or beyond these days it will
come and these are forward-looking standards with dolby vision being widely
regarded as better for enjoying films
and unfortunately that's where this complaint comes in and
it's pretty fair for movies that support dolby vision we
really do need to apologize for our previous oversight and clarify that we
would not recommend using the xbox series as a blu-ray player and it's
bizarre because the 1x handles dolby vision streaming content just fine
but for blu-rays it falls back to the weaker hdr10 master and for me anyway
the difference is really obvious there'll be vision time
oh well that's um a lot more obvious
it's that one well not even just the clouds the reflections off the surface of the beach
and the boats and stuff back there like it's just
this is nice but this is sun shining off stuff
but what about the rest the right is the one with dolby vision
and the left is not yeah
the right one okay right one
right hand one yeah that one yeah yeah it looks bluer
the right one yeah yeah that's pretty obvious i'm going with right
yes they could tell
and here's another reason why you might want to choose a proper blu-ray player
over the xbox it's the lack of straight 24 or 60 FPS support so you will
actually lose frames playing your blu-ray on an xbox though honestly not
many people are going to notice a missing frame every minute or so when they're coming in at 24 per second at
least that's the situation today if we were having this conversation a couple
of years ago yes when the series x launched there was
an issue with black levels and 4k HDR blu-ray playback but that has since been
resolved so unless you've never patched your console the chances of running into
that in your life are slim to none all of which raises the question
if you're not a big gamer and you just want the best home theater experience
possible what do you do the ps5 doesn't do dolby vision at all
so it's already out of the equation leaving us to choose from our standalone
player or an xbox series x both of which cost about 500 us dollars neither of
them support super audio cd but at least the panasonic is a bit easier to use
dolby atmos and dtsx the series x meanwhile supports these standards but
getting them to work properly across all devices can be finicky as for ease of
use and setup while we haven't experienced any hdcp handshake issues we
have seen reports of it online for the xbox and on top of that the panasonic
clearly has better support for dolby vision with proper chroma sub sampling
and better frame rate support but aside from dolby vision it's really hard to
spot the difference even if you know it's there so if you have a tv with dv
we've got to give it to the big p but for everyone else particularly if
you want the added functionality of playing video games or if you only use
streaming services anyway the xbox is still a great choice but hey you guys
decide for yourself we're going to have both of them linked below and if you
want to go really ham you can get the 1300 dpub 9000 it has similar features
to this blu-ray player but a much nicer build quality and high-end analog
circuitry for those of you looking for analog audio options oh and we also have
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at the link below thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video make sure to
check out our xbox series x versus series s comparison