Z9X 8K Dolby VS10 is worse than Z9X Pro and Dune 8K

I know, if only there was someone that put the record straight, and was a source of help and unbiased advice.....oh, wait, who springs to mind?..



In other news, I've fallen down the REW rabbit hole.....god help the wife now!

 

I don’t think most people have been negative here about zidoo in general, it was just the tonemapping from anything down to SDR and specifically comparing the z9x pro to the z9x 8k where most people thought that the older device was doing a better job at tonemapping down to SDR. I swapped over from the nvidia shield to the z9x pro, just received the z9x pro 4 days ago and I have been loving it. Everything is playing perfectly and the tonemapping with the vs10 engine and 3D playback has been awesome so far.

 

I have three go to scenes to check tone mapping - one is a well known scene from Aquaman where a big circular window needs good tone mapping to be visible, one is the shipyard explosions in Wall-E with bright specular highlights, and the third is The Meg which is only available in HDR10 but is well known for ridiculous HDR settings - it has MaxCLL set exactly to 4000nits using a 4000nit PVM which is highly suss and MaxFALL is 1193nits which is a nonsense. The Meg is one of those early titles where post houses really hadn't got a grip on how HDR worked yet and the motto seemed to be "make it bright as hell". I don't think there were even 4000nit PVMs available at that point!


The Aquaman scene is indistinguishable between the Z9X Pro and the 8K in both HDR10 and DV.

It's important to check both DV and HDR10 DV > VS10 SDR uses the RPU and of course HDR10 > VS10 SDR doesn't have an RPU.

The Wall-E scene is a different kettle of fish.

HDR10 > VS10 SDR on both the Pro and the 8K seem identical.

In both cases, DV > VS10 SDR shows blooming but the Pro is far worse that the 8K.

And the Meg, more complicated.

My usual scene is when they're in the water - levels are completely mad and the whole scene is washed out without decent tone mapping.

In that case, yes the Pro makes a slightly better job of it but neither are particularly good - as I say, that's the source that's the issue there.

Bottom line, if the source is mastered correctly which is generally the case these days (and in the early days only affected a handful of titles) I think the 8K does a better job. It also does a way better job with the UI as well which is important to some but not others.

But this can all depend on equipment, so YMMV.

Bottom line, I think it depends on content but both do a pretty good job given they're not video processors.

 

I don't have The Meg, but would you have approx timecodes for Aquaman and Wall-E? I'd like to see what my system is doing with difficult material. Thanks.

 

Aquaman starts at 50:27 and the tricky bit is at 50:42 as you see the big circular window thing in front of him - it's the radial details that can get lost.

Wall-E starts at 21:50 and the tricky bit is where the ship falls over at 21:59 - look at the bottom part of the hull.

 

I've looked at these two scenes and even compared the Aquaman scene to the original disc on an Oppo 203. The image from the Zidoo is subjectively identtical to the Oppo. I don't see any discernable loss of detail. Same with Wall-E. I see very bright flames with a thin, bright line at the bottom of the fire. I may see about finding The Meg to look at that, but I know my TV is rated above 4000 nit. I have viewed quite a bit of very high nit test images (1000, 2000, 4000, 10,000). I lose some in the 10,000 nit material, but the 4000 nit material looks great, for what it is. 4000 nits is too bright for extended comfortable viewing in a theater environment (dark room).

 

Don't forget we're talking specifically about converting DV and HDR10 to SDR using VS10 here - not native performance.

 

I suppose I did overlook that. I'll bow out of this conversation as I am a big fan of the benefits of the UHD format besides resolution, HDR/Dolby Vision. I've spent a lot of money to get that level of performance. I was briefly concerned the Zidoo was not giving me good HDR performance.

In other words...nevermind.

 

Thanks for your testing! Do you see any other differences in terms of picture quality or audio quality? Is the 8k outside the vs10 engine/tonemapping providing a better picture or audio quality compared to the pro model?

 

No, for native outputs both are pretty much identical for video. Audio quality isn't really relevant because the vast majority of content will be bitstream, so again, no.

There may be differences with Dolby Vision under certain circumstances - the Pro does not convert to Profile 8 on the fly and doesn't support CMv4.0.

HDR options on the 8K are vastly superior with the ability to send TV Led correctly and forcing CMv4.0 if needed (say a custom EDID doesn't support CMv4.0 but the display does...).

On the whole the 8K would be the right choice if that's what you're asking.

 

@Markswift2003
I tried to search as I'm sure you've answered this before, but do you recommend sending HDR to a JVC projector (Nz9) mapped to SDR or do you think using custom EDID for DV is ideal. I am having a hard time understanding what the best zidoo settings would be for my setup. I am using a zidoo 3000pro with an Anthem 1140 8k and a JVC Nz9 projector. I just want to make sure I am getting the most out of my system.

Thank you in advance.

 

This is only my opinion and you need to test yourself, but I think LLDV on JVC projectors looks stunning!!! I set the Zidoo to output LLDV for all content using a 1000nit LLDV EDID and this means most of the legwork is done by the JVC's dynamic tone mapping but true Dolby Vision maintains the subtle trim changes.

I set the UI to 4K23 with frame rate mode only so with a constant HDR Mode (LLDV) and constant resolution (4K) I only see resyncs on the odd occasion when the frame rate changes to 24Hz.

I used to use a 400nit EDID on my old static tone map JVC as that meant the Zidoo was doing more work, but I find 1000nits is the sweet spot with the NZ800. Others swear by a 4000nit EDID so it's worth playing about a bit.

 

A vote here for the 4000nit EDID with an NZ7....

 

Thank you! I had everything the same other than 1000nit. I was using 400 nit. I will toggle and back and forth and give it a try. I appreciate the advice.