In my recent comparison of inexpensive Blu-ray players for Sound and Image magazine, I introduced a new picture quality test. Here’s how I explained it:
In assessing picture quality, I made resort to a test that shall henceforth be known as ‘Zombie Strippers’. The name is simply too delicious to resist.I base the test on playing back a movie trailer on the recently released Sony Pictures Entertainment Blu-ray of Felon. That is a fine and serious movie, well worth viewing, so forgive it for also carrying a trailer for a dreadfully bad movie called Zombie Strippers. This, apparently, is going to be released on Blu-ray. The trailer itself is in 480i format.
I’ve noticed an odd thing about Blu-ray. NTSC DVDs generally carry their movies in 24 frames per second format (although the frames are divided into interlaced fields). The DVD player performs the 3:2 pulldown required to convert this to 60 frames per second. But on Blu-ray, Special Features presented in 480i format tend to have already had the 3:2 pulldown performed upon them. This uses more space, but Blu-ray has space to burn. So about two fifths of the frames are heavily interlaced, presenting a deinterlacing challenge for some Blu-ray players. It was on this trailer that I first noticed this behaviour. So ‘Zombie Strippers’ will be the test.
That stuff about how the 480i video can be presented in different ways is covered in somewhat more detail here (see the section ‘NTSC — where interlacing goes wrong’).
Incidentally, the pack shot I’ve shown for this movie I grabbed from the persistent storage USB memory stick I used in a Blu-ray player. It had been downloaded from the Internet by the BD-Live facility on one of the Sony BD-Live discs I’d been checking out.