Hi, I have a SONY MUSE HIL-C2EX Boxed in the rare Titanium colour with the wooden panels at the side along with the matching muse decoder, the rare Muse MSC-3000 with the wooden panels. this isn't boxed. the Sony player comes with the remote aswell. Looking to maybe sell this along with the 100v transformers. Any offers or anyone who knows a buyer will be greatly welcomed.Cheers Matt

When I get my Hi-Vision player, I'll do some apples-to-apples comparisons. I have both the MUSE Test Disc & the Squeeze Test Disc, which have (as I understand it) substantially identical contents. My home TV is a 1080i CRT, & I haven't yet succeeded in getting my 1920×1080 PC monitor to accept 1125-line interlaced GBR/HV — but if I need to, I'll take my stuff down to the anime club meeting & use the 1080p projector there. I have a camera which does 720p video, which might be able to give a decent impression of moving images.

It came today!


There may be some fine-tuning issues, but the two discs I've watched so far have at least looked like HD should.

What discs?

Greece & the Aegean & The Test Disk. Reveiws I've seen said Romantic Greece is not one of the best in terms of picture quality, & I'd say that's fair, but it's still definitely HD. (I found the music annoying, though.) The Test Disk is clearly better. I have yet to watch my copy of Chaplin.

The two I really want are Imperial Wedding Ceremony & Ginga no Uo — maybe I can trade for them.

So how did they end up comparing to D-VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, HDDVD, etc.?

The video ones, I'd say, stand up well compared to ATSC 1080i. The one movie disc I have is recognizably HD, but the transfer is far from what would be considered reference quality today — both muddy & noisy. Of course, this is often the case on NTSC LDs, as well, while the ones shot on video are beautiful.

One thing I did notice is that the kind of pressing defects, or whatever, which produce small white speckles on NTSC discs are much more noticable on MUSE discs. Partly this is because, if we imagine the defects are the same physical size, & they occupy about 1/8 the length of a line on a standard disc, it's more like 1/4 on the Hi-Vision disc, since there are twice as many lines, & also the 12:11 time compression to deal with.

Do all MUSE LD players play NTSC LDs?

There are industrial models which don't, I believe. The Pioneer HLD-V500 & HLD-V700, it seems to me, are MUSE-only, & I have been told that the player buried in the NEC Virtual Aquarium is a Sony HIL-C2EX with no NTSC section.

hi,

last night I watched "back to the future:part 1", it is brilliant. however, I clearly noticed that the total picture resoltion right out of my sony MSC-4000 is approximately 1866 x 1035 as I can see a black rectangle wrapping the whole picture on my 1920 x 1080 display.

is it common? can I fix it through the lumagen HDQ?

thanks.

No, that's correct. The MUSE format cuts off the right & left edges of the picture, & was designed for the original BTS-S.001 HDTV specification, which has only 1035 active lines. 1032 active lines by 1870 active pixels is what you would get when sampling the decoder output at 74.25 MHz, although the actual pixel clock frequency is 44.55 MHz, so the horizontal resolution is nominally 3/5 that of "1080i". (Since the bandwidth of 1080i is limited to 30 MHz, whereas 1920 pixels corresponds to 37.125 MHz, MUSE actually performs a bit better in comparison.)

thanks Pub,

I will try the HDQ anyway then witness the probable progress of true 1080P on my display.

To be honest, it is really a soft pain when watching analog HD on digital HD panel. However, it is also where the enjoyment comes from.

So, I am said to be someone deserves:)

Well, I've taken some comparison videos of MUSE versus 16:9 NTSC, in 720p. It's not perfect, but it shows definite differences. When I get the clips edited, I'll post them.

One problem is that the color keeps shifting all over the place, which I think has to do partly with the auto-exposure on the camera, & partly with the fact that I was using a one-chip DLP projector, so the color wheel & the camera scan drift in & out of alignment, making the picture more red or green or blue at different moments.

Hi, Pub:

Last night I finally got the picture to be roughly correctly displayed on the panel. But, the drama is that PQ is quite far from my expectation (I know it is a little bit high though).

Firstly, I use the normal scaling to 1080p@59.94 out of my HDQ. The active image is actually 1866x1065p with vertical GREEN comb bar on the right hand side.

Secondly, I adjusted the horizontal output resolution from 1920 to 2000, which pushed the vertical GREEN comb bar out of the panel.

Finally, I adjusted the size of active image from 100% to about 115% so as to eliminate the green compression noise on the right hand side.

OK, all done. It is basically watchable but still not there as what I wanted.

Because HDQ should be able to drive the panel in a so called pixel-perfect mode even if the input is 1080i, I have to go through all options HDQ can offer to calibrate the picture and come back up with more detail hopefully.

As far as the colour is concerned, my panel gave more greenish bias than red and blue. And I reckon hi vision could be more friendly to flat panel rather than projectors due to displaying theory and mechanism.

Just my poor experience:(

I don't know why you would be getting a green bar on the right-hand side. Are you using YPbPr or GBR connexion? I observed ringing at the right-hand side on one of the video segments of the Test Disk, using the HIL-C2EX/MST-2000 combination, but I think that is related to the source material.

Any vertical stretching could produce some softness in that direction, but otherwise it seems as though you should be getting better results than you are, with the player & decoder you are using.

Hi, Pub:

Yes, the signal path is like below
output | device | output | device|output| input | device
MUSE -> MSC-4000 -> YPbPr -> HDQ -> DVI ~> HDMI -> plasma

Actually, the deinterlacing might be the cause of those green bar alike video noise. I am sure that MSC-4000 output 1 can be configured as either YPbPr or RGBHV. I would double check if I have selected the correct mode.

However, I still need to thoroughly re-calibrate all the gears within connection to make the possible improvement. But, it is truly hard to conquer the mismatch between a hi-vision of 1866 x 1035 and the native resolution of 1920 x 1080 panel by some consumer level gear.

Anyway, I do it tonight or tomorrow as it will be raining all this weekend!

Thanks.

I would suggest using GBR instead of YPbPr, because of the way the signal processing chain works. It should be one less step inside the MSC-4000, & the matrix coefficients may be different. My opinion is that the best result you are going to get is with the 1870*1032 windowboxed into 1920*1080, with a small black area around each side. You would probably do well to get a copy of the Test Disk, if you can, since it does include some monitor calibration patterns which may be of use.

I don't know how the HDQ works, but on my Crystalio II in MUSE mode, I zoom the (whole) picture by 3% to get rid of anything "odd",
and the result is that MUSE just looks like any other 1080i 1920x1080 source that goes into my Pioneer Plasma. And as I am using the
Victor HV-MD2 I can only use YPbPr by default. In fact I once had a YPbPr to RGBHV box, but that did not make the picture better,
nor worse, so I got rid of it a long time ago. With the Crystalio II I usually output MUSE as 1080p24 or 1080p60 via HDMI.

When I still had the SONY HDM-2830 1080i CRT we once made a test between the HV-MD2 and the MSC-4000.
And I have to say I preferred how the MD2 picture looked (using an X9 as source), the MSC-4000 picture had a
very greenish tint, and in RGB mode on the test disc it looked like some extra added "dot-crawl" was introduced.

Some friends later repeated the MUSE decoder test (not including the MD2) using an X0 and a HLD-1000 as source,
and they decided that some Panasonic decoder was the most visually pleasing.

What I do like about the MSC-4000 is the looks, and its versatility. And the optional remote for the fun of it.

Hi, All:

Thanks for all the information shared within the post, all of them are highly intuitive and valuable!!

Ok, my final, or second to final, report over the HDQ.

First of all, many thanks to the "input size" settings on the HDQ, which allows me to actually select the input size of pixels to be processed and scaled as well. Therefore, I used this feature to frame out the exact image I want to preserve for precessing.

It is then all easy and normal steps. I believe the input resolution should lie in the range of "OTHERS" while the others are 480i/576i, 720p and 1080i.

I have not used any ZOOM, PAN or things alike and the output image fills out the entire panel at 1920x1080p@60Hz without any border. How amazing and exciting, as far as I am concerned:)

The next, maybe only left, step is to calibrate the colour which is not too bad at the moment by my sight.

As for the MSC-4000, yes, it is truly greenish biased which is already proved from all my MUSE movie sources. However, as the HDQ has only RGBS not RGBHV input, the YPbPr is now the only signal I can deal with.

Anyway, I am quite happy with the picture quality at the moment. If by any chance I can come across any other muse decoder I believe there must be room for further improvement.

Hmm, if you can get a composite or Sync on Green signal, you might be able to record it with an USRP. That's a special AD/DA converter box for wide band signals. It might be just possible to capture the signal with it and convert it to pictures via software. The main problem is of course that those boxes are expensive. (~$1000)