The worst misuse of spectrum is SBS, which simply repeats SBS1 on SBS HD, upscaled to 720p. Poorly much of the time. My sense is that occasionally there may be a movie which is higher res on HD than on 1, but I haven’t taken any steps to try to confirm my impression.

I’m reserving judgement on IPTV. At the moment things like Bigpond Movies are low bitrate. 1.8Mbps, I think, for the SD content. Sometimes it can look respectable, but that’s about it. The codecs are more advanced than MPEG2, allowing somewhat better picture quality. I have watched a couple of so-called HD movies on Bigpond, too, and they are also clearly low bitrate. Some had also had shoddy frame rate conversions, or so it seemed, with a regular jerkiness.

So no guarantee that IPTV will actually deliver higher quality. I hope I’m wrong though.

Given I don’t watch any commercial FTA, I’m kind of over it now, but apart from the wastage of bit-rate on audio that you pointed out, the one thing that continues to piss me off to no end, is the fact that ABC1 will continue to be standard def, while their 720p channel is wasted on up scaling SD news to 720p on ABC24! We are missing out on so much cool BBC HD material as a result.

My only hope is that when the analogue switch off is complete, that they will reverse that situation so hat ABC1 ends ups 720p with ABC24 becoming a 576i channel. However even then, for this to happen everyone out there who wants to watch ABC would need an HD STB, not one of the many useless SD STBs which were sold for so long.

ABC and SBS are the only channels I care about and both of them provide zero native HD content. It’s a very depressing system that we’ll be stuck with for ages. Bring on the NBN and the IPTV revolution. It’s now our only hope for quality HD programming.

The slo-mo I was talking about is usually very brief, and obviously done in post production. Proper slow motion is an entirely different matter and is done as you say. Eg, the credits sequence of The Fall is something to behold.

Next time I notice a cheap and nasty post-production slo-mo I’ll mention it (unless I can recall one first).

Having said that I NEVER use the “Intelligent Frame Creation” feature on my Panasonic plasma in anticipation of higher frame rates. In truth it does a pretty good job at it with relatively few artifacts, but the “waxy” look you refer to is indeed apparent, and the overall effect appears unnatural and “over-processed”. I also want to watch the film as close as possible to the way the director intended (which is certainly not with digitally interpolated frames on a TV).

On the other hand I had a friend in the US send me some DVDs of native 720p60 transport stream clips (MPEG2) of baseball and Ice Hockey games recorded directly from ESPN at the healthy bit-rate of 16mbps. Given it was sport, the camera shutter speed is also very high, and the clarity of 60 unique progressive frames a second is nothing short of astounding. As far as sports go I actually prefer the drop in spatial resolution to 720p60 over 1080i50, as the clarity during motion (which is what sport is all about isn’t it?) is miles ahead, and devoid of the horrible interlaced effects of 1080i (made worse by our station’s terribly low bit-rate HD, resulting in MPEG artefacts galore). Its well known that progressive formats compress better in MPEG2, and at 16mbps the picture is simply superb.

Although sports are obviously a very different scenario to film, it still provided me with a glimpse of what could be achieved with HFR cinema and its very obvious why ESPN decided 720p was the preferable format over 1080i for sports.

It will obviously take a while for some people to warm to the look of 48p films, given we are so accustomed to that “shot on film” look of 24p. However it won’t take long for people to adjust. Peter Jackson himself said that ten minutes probably wasn’t enough for the preview as it takes a while for your eyes to adjust to the new look. However when you do the benefits will becomes apparent very quickly.

“Furthermore, 48fps provides greater cinematic capabilities. For example, from time to time you see a conventional movie drop back into half-speed slow motion for a moment, primarily to dwell on a character or to strike an emotional note in the narrative. And you always see the 12fps judder resulting from this”

Sorry to doubt your wisdom on this one Stephen, but are you certain this is how slo-mo is currently done for film ? My understanding is that for slow-motion in films, they actually shoot at greater frames per second (i.e. 200fps) but then play it back at 24ps, resulting in smooth slow motion as each frame is still unique. The higher the frame rate it was shot at, the slower and smoother the footage will appear when played back at 24fps. This certainly appears to be the case with most modern films. Not to mention YouTube is now littered with high speed videos played back at low frame rates. The reason being you can buy many cheap camcorders and still cameras with high-speed video settings now (my friend’s $300 Canon point-and-shoot can record 480p at 120fps, but then plays it back at 30fps for very smooth quarter-speed “slow-motion” footage).

I have also confirmed that they do not leak or bleed any image meant for the other lens. Since last posting I have actually come across a test patterns and calibration for 3D( including ghosting &crosstalk) and home theatre settings in,incredibly, the Toy Story 3D blu-ray. -http://www.amazon.com/Toy-Story-Four-Disc-Combo-Blu-ray/dp/B005GSVFBE/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1336627799&sr=8-3 .

It is really useful and has helped me in my settings and confirmed that the 3D in the Soniq is working perfectly. I would encourage others to check these tools out as they are very useful.

Also thankyou for your earlier advice regarding the sharpness settings, bringing it back to about 30,from the pre-set of 50 has helped my picture significantly.

I have no idea about the Soniq’s algorithm. You could try creating test patterns like I did in that other post to see what happens.

I’m not much of a fan of 2D to 3D conversions because they will inevitably produce weird results from time to time. Their detection algorithms are trying to work out what’s in the foreground and what’s in the background based on very approximate heuristics. They are very frequently fooled.

Yes, passive 3D is very low in crosstalk if you sit in the right position vertically. There is still probably a tiny amount of crosstalk because there tends to be very small amount of leakage through the polarising filters of the eyewear itself. But you’d be hard put to notice it.

The Sony Personal Viewer review is going in Connected Home Solutions. It won’t be appearing on this site.

I would also like to make the point, that using the clip-on lenses, as I have to wear my glasses anyway, feels like the closest thing to glasses free 3D possible. Very convenient.Even though some conversions may not look the best, I have become used to watching normal foxtel converted,and really love it.

Another thing, I can clearly see the raster lines in your & other display pics of passive 3D tv’s, but I honestly no matter how close I go,cannot see them on my Soniq tv in 3D.
I have gone close enough to see the little black outlines (boxes) of what I think are the individual pixels, but still can’t see what I know is the major hang-up,along with the lost resloution per eye, that most who prefer active point to. I wonder if the software update I had to apply for it to recognise SBS mode also updated the firmware with the new algorthym of LG’s which is supposed to work for their Cinema 3D. Soniq makes no mention of this but does make it clear it uses the LG Cinema technology and panels in their tellys. Do you think this is possible?
Thanks again.