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Players' Image Quality

Two Blu-ray players, Pioneer's Elite BDP-HD1 and Sony's BDP-S1, gave us the best images: Each scored in the top two for image detail, color quality, and brightness and contrast across both our high-definition and our standard-definition tests. In Rumor Has It, we could almost count the hairs in the stubble on Kevin Costner's face. Both players rendered fine details, which in turn added depth--in the crowded backstage scene of Phantom's chapter 3, for example, and in Mission: Impossible III, chapter 7. In the latter, when the camera pulled back in the Vatican, hallways and staircases appeared three-dimensional, and cobblestones rendered clearly. Shadow detail in the black-and-white Good Night and Good Luck was so sharp we could see the costume details on extras who weren't positioned in the light.

Our Best Buy Samsung and the second-ranked Philips rendered these scenes very nicely as well, though a shade less distinctly (still other players reproduced the scenes just a tad more blurrily than even the Samsung and the Philips did). Sony's PlayStation 3 performed comparably to the Samsung and the Philips with Blu-ray Discs but disappointed in its handling of standard-def DVDs--not surprising, as it can't upscale them to 1080p, a capability Sony says it will offer in a firmware update.

Toshiba's HD-XA2 produced strong image quality as well. With a score of Very Good from our judges, its output was the best of the HD DVD players. But colors looked slightly muted compared with those generated by the best players, and background details were a little less sharp and deep.

Panasonic's DMP-BD10 handled detail, brightness, and contrast very well, but the unit faltered on color quality. A mild reddish tint marred skin tones.

Toshiba's HD-A2--the least-expensive player in this group--suffered from subpar color handling, brightness and contrast, and detail. Only the Xbox 360 combo did worse, and by a significant margin. The Xbox 360's component-only output produced images that were less sharp and crisp than those output over HDMI. Both players top out at 1080i resolution, which could explain the interlacing artifacts we saw in Mission: Impossible III's chapter 7, where a brick wall showed a distracting moiré pattern and vibrating bricks. Viewed on competing players at 1080p, the bricks were solid, distinct, and motionless.