Blurry picture, re: DVD UPC: 043396087347. Your help is needed.
Does your copy of Enigma look blurry? Would you like a better looking DVD for free? I'm going to try to shame someone (probably Sony) into recalling something (probably these DVDs). Will you join me?
What you can do:
Post the following in reply to this post:
1 - The UPC (or EAN) of your copy of Enigma.
2 - The make and model of your DVD (or Blu-ray) player.
3 - The make and model of your television.
My data:
UPC: 043396087347.
Player: Panasonic SA-BTT490.
TV: Vizio E241-A1.
Symptom: Some scenes look blurry.
Note: How to read a UPC barcode: ...How to read an EAN barcode:
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0 4 3 3 9 6 0 8 7 3 4 7 5 0 1 7 1 8 8 8 8 5 0 5 8 >UPC is 12 digits, e.g.: 043396087347 ...EAN is 13 digits, e.g.: 5017188885058
Does the following describe your DVD?
Time 0:00:24, Trafalgar Square, London.Take 1: High establishing shot, Big Ben in background, top of red bus passes in foreground.Cut to...Take 2: Tracking shot follows Claire wearing ornate white dress with white boa.
**DOES THIS TAKE LOOK BLURRY?**
How about the next?
Time 0:04:42, The lawn, Government Code & Cypher School, Bletchley Park.High-to-low crane shot as Tom Jericho walks toward men arranging rows of lawn chairs.
**AS THE CAMERA PANS DOWN, INSTEAD OF MOVING SMOOTHLY, DO THE BACKS OF THE CHAIRS SEEM TO CRAWL UP THE SCREEN?**
I've encountered this in television when a sync problem reverses the interlace. Some things that could screw up the fields (there are 2 fields: odd-lines and even-lines, per frame) are: the pulldown (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-two_pull_down) was botched during the telecine for the affected scenes, or the MPEG-2 header has bogus data for the affected scenes - there's probably more possible causes, but these are the most likely.
However, it is possible that the problem is in the player (example: the deinterlacing), not the DVD. Or, it is possible there are complementary faults in both. The blurriness of my DVD is worse when playing it in a Blu-ray player and viewing it with a True-HD television (actual 1920x1080 pixels), but that could be an up-conversion problem in the player.
We don't know what we'll find until we try. Who knows? The DVD (or Blu-ray) player-manufacturers may even help us to finger Sony as the cause. Or we may discover quirks in our players - for example, I'm not totally happy with my Panasonic home theater - that may force them to update the firmware.
PS:
I just thought of another possible cause. This film was made in the U.K. Perhaps the 576p capture was the only telecine. Perhaps the 480p data was converted from it. The pulldown would be easy: 1-1-1-2-1-1-1-2. This makes so much sense that I can't imagine they went back to the original film print to make a 480p telecine. The only fly in the ointment would be the conversion from 576 lines to 480 lines. They could have screwed up the fields in the -2- part of the pulldown during the 576-to-480-line conversion, or maybe they did the conversion of some scenes before the pulldown and that explains why some scenes are okay while others are "blurry". Whatever the cause, I think the DVD may be defective in manufacture. ...but it is fun trying to figure out what happened based solely on the symptoms. - M. share