Question:
Dear Big Picture Big Sound,
Just a brief note on my background: I worked for RCA for 25 years designing ICs for television and was involved in some of the early HD work. I also hold 97 patents mostly in TV IC design. Despite all this experience one might think I could figure all this stuff out, but I hate to admit that it isn’t true. I have a difficult time using the HDTVs and upconverting DVD recorders. I have no idea how a "layman" could deal with this stuff! One of the problems is that all the manuals are written in some Japanese-American dialect with a bunch of pictures that don’t make much sense.
I have one of the Panasonic DMR-EZ27 recorders you reviewed. I have found that the only way you can playback in a near-normal 16:9 format is if you record directly from the cable using digital format (QAM). Of course, if you try to talk to someone at Panasonic they won’t let you speak to someone who really knows what’s going on. You get this girl who reads the prerecorded text off her computer screen. "We apologize for the problem you are experiencing, please hold on while I check further." etc...
Also, after recording through the tuner, when playing back in 16:9, the picture has the annoying characteristic of appearing to go in and out of focus at about a 1 Hz rate. I wonder if you noticed that. I had returned the recorder to Panasonic to check whether it was working correctly and all they did was to update the firmware and say that all was normal. There was no difference in its apparent operation.
Last, but not least, it appears to be impossible to record through any of the video input jacks and play it back with the correct 16:9 aspect ratio. This is what you would like to do if you are recording from a cable decoder. Despite the fact that the manual shows a 16:9 image with a DVD-RAM next to it, seemingly indicating that a DVD-RAM was necessary to achieve 16:9 playback, using a DVD-RAM made no difference in the recorder’s capability. I went to the trouble of ordering a box of disks from Best Buy since nobody seems to carry them in the stores anymore. There is no doubt that these are higher quality disks but they didn’t make any difference in the operation of the recorder. I have even tried some of the downloadable software that lets you change the format flags.
...
The recorder does not have component video inputs as I believe none of them have at this point. It is interesting what happens though that if you record a 16:9 broadcast through the video inputs, When you play the movie back it is in some kind of stretched 16:9 format, maybe something like 20:9? No matter what formatting you select from the recorder and/or the TV you still get the same superstretched picture - close to what you want but very, very frustrating...
I guess we have to wait for the HD recorders that are now just appearing in Japan with price tags in the $1500 to $2000 dollar range. Of course, the early VHS recorders were priced in that range too.
Best regards,
-Steve
Hi, Steve,
I did not notice this in/out of focus problem that you mention on our review sample. Seems like that may be a defect. But the way the recorder handles 16:9 material is similar to the way you describe it – only when recorded via the internal tuner and only when recorded on DVD-RAM discs.
I used NTSC for testing (broadcast) not QAM (cable) and found that when I recorded a 16:9 show onto DVD-R it "squished" it (anamorphically) to fit on the 4:3 DVD, but the anamorphic flag was not recorded so to get proper playback aspect ratio I had to "stretch" it (on the TV’s aspect ratio control) back out to 16:9. With the TV’s aspect ratio set to stretch or 16:9 mode, the geometry was correct and the image filled the screen without distortion. You might try using a separate DVD player for playback just so you can see what’s going on here in the recording and on playback.
On a DVD-RAM disc, however, the widescreen flag is captured so when you record a 16:9 program onto a DVD-RAM (again, recording from the internal ATSC tuner), it will automatically play the recording back at its correct aspect ratio.
If you’re getting some kind of "superwide" playback, then you should go into the cable box set-up menu and the DVD recorder's set-up menu and make 100% sure that you have specified a TV aspect ratio of 16:9 (not 4:3 or 4:3 letterbox) in the set-up menus. If you have the EZ27 set for a non-widescreen TV (4:3) but your TV is actually widescreen, then I would imagine you’d get super-stretched material when you try to view letterboxed content from that player on your HDTV.
If you are recording from the S-Video or composite video output of a high definition cable box, and you have your cable box set up for a widescreen TV then it should "squish" 16:9 output anamorphically to fit the widescreen image into a 4:3 recording. Again, it will NOT pass the anamorphic flag (even if you use DVD-RAM) so you’ll need to stretch it back out on the TV at playback time in order to get proper geometry.
Yes, when I think about it, this stuff is all very complicated, mostly because we’re in this transition between analog and digital, 4:3 and 16:9. And the DVD format itself is actually a 4:3 format with widescreen capabilities grafted on top of it via the anamorphic flag. Hopefully when Blu-ray Disc gets recording capabilities (at an affordable price) these kinds of issues will be minimized. But until then it’s all very confusing, only made more so by the manufacturers who don’t seem to care too much that they’re not respecting the aspect ratio of the program material (except under specific, limited circumstances).
And by the way, Panasonic is not the only culprit. Most other vendors' DVD recorders handle the widescreen flag equally badly from what I have seen. And your approach to use software to rip the DVD files onto a PC, edit the flag using specialized software then burn the files back to DVD can work, but it requires that you make your recording in squeezed anamorphic mode on the DVD. Then when you adjust the anamorphic flag, it will tell the player to stretch it back out at playback time to 16:9 format. This is pretty klugey and requires mutliple steps, but if you're recording widescreen high definition movies or shows that you want to keep, then it may be worth the effort.
Good luck!
-Chris
