DVD upscale on BDP-s6700

[dvdx001]

My new Sony BDP-s6700 does not do a good job in DVD playback. My TV is 37 inch Sony Bravia KDL- 37V550. The blu-ray player has the 4K upscale feature, but I don’t care about that, since my TV’s display resolution is only Full HD 1920 x 1080 anyway. What I want is simply to watch my old DVD-s and, no, I do not plan to replace all of them with blu-ray or 4K disks. With the BDP-s6700, however, the picture of DVD is not sharp, but somewhat blurry and the colors are pastel. It is pretty painful to watch. The player is connected to the TV with high-speed HDMI and 24p output is set to Auto. When I play the same DVD with my 10+ years old Philips BDP3000 Blu-ray player on the same TV set, the picture is crisper, grainier and the colors look deeper. Even blu-ray disks look blander on the Sony player. I would have expected the new equipment to do better.

What might be the cause of this? And what could be the best settings for TV and BDP for watching DVDs? Might the reason be that Philips player is doing upscaling itself, but Sony player leaves the upscaling for the TV to do?  

Oh, and one more question – several of the disks I tried had subtitles in yellow (even when other languages I selected on the same disk were white). What could be the cause of that?

Thanks!

[royabrown2]

@dvdx001 

https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/res/manuals/4579/b666bd879546b9e3c94440c2d44b34e7/45796701M...

Look at pages 26 and 27 of the manual that came with your BDP-S6700, either on your paper copy, or via the link above.

There you will find many video settings changes that you can make on the player, including whether it does the upscaling or leaves it to your TV; have a play with these and see if they make a difference.

Did you plug the Philips player into the same HDMI port, or a different one? If the latter, try plugging the Sony player into that port. As it is possible that every HDMI port on your TV has its own individual video settings, and these could do with a tweak; but rather than fiddle with this right now, try the known to be good input, as a test.

Just to say, by the way, that I have a BDP-S6700 in front of me right now, on which I am watching old DVDs of programmes that never made it to BluRay; and while DVD will never be as good as BluRay, the colour and PQ are entirely acceptable, even upscaled by the player onto my LG 65” GX.

[dvdx001]

Thank you, @royabrown2 
I fiddled with these settings. The Auto/1080p options are indistinguishable, but others are even worse. The 1080p output option still makes the faces too smooth. Don't know what SBM (Super Bit Mapping) option does.

I am concerned about one sentence in the manual: "Select [Original Resolution] to output the resolution
recorded on the disc. When the resolution is lower than the SD resolution, it is scaled up to the SD resolution." Does this mean that the player does not scale anything higher than SD, or does this apply only to media that is lower than SD.

I wonder if UBP-X700 does a better job in upscaling DVDs, or the players do not differ in this regard.

[royabrown2]

@dvdx001 

That sentence gave me pause also.

But yes, this only applies to media lower than SD; though it can handle them, it can’t output them, and so it has to upscale them a bit to get them to at least SD.

But this doesn’t apply to DVDs, so you have two choices; output them in SD and let the TV upscale them to HD, or have the player upscale them to HD and let the TV just show this directly.

Try both, and see which you think is the better upscaler.

You have to be careful how you set the upscaling; Sony’s Auto mode kind of says ‘If the TV I’m sending to is a Sony, I’m going to let that do the upscaling, as it might be newer and better than I am. But if it is not a Sony, then nothing any other make of TV can do will ever upscale better than I can, so I will do the upscaling’.

And both statements could be wrong. So I never use Auto mode, and I let my eyes decide where the upscaling is best done. Which will vary from TV to TV, but only needs to be done once, unless you keep swapping the player from TV to TV.

Re SBM, I think it is to stop that ‘staircase’ effect when viewing, say, a sunset scene, and you see bands of colour instead of smooth gradation. I would say turn it on, and only turn it off if it makes the picture look odd. Which is what Sony are trying to say there under Off, but it got a bit lost in translation.