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This week I went back to my old Sharp 55" RPTV, the main reason is that I wanted to test my new Toshiba HD-A3 HD-DVD player on a bigger screen than my 37" LCD, since I didn't noticed much of a difference between SD-DVD and HD-DVD(maybe a 10% improvement). To be honest size does matter when it comes to HD, HD-DVDs do look better on my Sharp even at 1080i via component vs 1080i via HDMI on my 37" LCD.
But this time Shrink won on visual tests for titles 1&2. The Transformers encode made by HC/Procdoder/CCE showed some serious blocks on semi-static scenes and dark areas, while Shrink looked some much like the original. Some people say that the HD-A3 is one of the best 1080i up-converter, but until now I only experienced with with my XBOX(XBMC) and with my HTPC. The HD-A3 seems like a very discriminative player and it really shows the flaws on the encoded material.
Once again I wanted to try something different so I tried a very bad source, the TV series LEXX S2V1 4-epidodes disc, which are very noisy and badly transferred/authored DVDs. This time didn't bother with PSNR just visual testing and to be honest Shrink came out ahead once again, followed on a tied for 2nd place by HC/Procoder and at the bottom CCE.
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