NanoTech Entertainment Inc (NTEK)

[shajandr]

To be Specific with UltraFlix Viewing

I noticed some color banding on some clips, such as the Tokyo Timescapes (the part of dark sky at the evening shots), and some image shifts at the forest shots. The image quality was no better than a decent Blu-Ray disc upscaled by the 4K projector.

I noticed some image shifting at the end of the clip "El Dorado". Over the past two years I have seen and tested "El Dorado" probably over 50 times on my 4K Sony player and projector, it never did that. Although the content title shows as "El Dorado-HD" my 4K projector disclosed the input resolution as 3840x2160 30p. The Nuvola player was set as "auto" but, as I said before, the player forces everything to be output as 2160 30fps. The image was nice but not representative of what the 4K format can provide in terms of image quality. I compared the same clip with the Sony 4K player, and the NP-1 version was softer.

The "Liftinoff-HD" clip of air-balloons showed a soft image equivalent to an HD cable channel over-compressed at half of its bit rate. Its appearance did not even qualify as an HD image demo. A similar demo clip w/1080i resolution was shown in the late 90s when HDTV was introduced and it had more clarity than this 4K version. The grass was shown as a solid cartoonish large green object with no clarity or definition on the grass blades. The rendering and detail of the colorful balloons was soft and undefined as well.

The "Destinations" video short has several vertical and horizontal camera shots that are very jumpy; the pans appear to be too fast for the 4K 30fps. On the SMPTE conference I attended in Hollywood one technical track gave many hints to 4K camera operators, such as not panning faster that 1/10th the speed of a walking person because 4K is very sensitive to faster panning. Many camera shots are also out of focus, with the incorrect depth of field making the closer rocky scenery as blurred as the mile away trees. Other shots are sharp, such as the scenes of the black bird, but the bird is well focused throughout the shot perhaps because the bird and the camera are not moving. That is great but video is not about showing slides.

Both "Puerta del Sol" clips show many shots with motion blurriness and judder. The effects were more accentuated on the shots when people just moved a bit, making the edges of their bodies and faces overlap as they move, like viewing 3D parallax without 3D glasses. The shot of the slow moving bus showed its windows and the advertising letters on its side panel shaking as it moved. On the shot exploring the city buildings the camera moves slowly and the image shows judder. At 5:11 minutes the "Puerta del Sol" clip shows a statue of a horse in a plaza, there is judder as the camera pans the horse from down up. There was a still camera shot of the horse statue, the camera was shaken suddenly (obviously its tripod was tripped by the operator). "Puerta del Sol 2" shows many people with faces pushing to red. Both clips are not pleasant to watch regardless of resolution.

The "LA Heli" clip is blurry and showed similar pan issues, now because the scenery moves in front of the camera mounted on the helicopter, the judder effect also makes watching the clip uncomfortable.

There were other clips with similar image issues. How much of this was the content or the player or both is not clear but other content did not show the judder. If I would be UltraFlix I would not have used those clips for 4K demonstration. Other YouTube clips showed better.

http://www.hdtvmagazine.com/articles/2014/12/living-with-4k-nanotech-np1-4k-media-player.php