Unsurprisingly with all of this in mind, there is no provision made for film mode deinterlacing (detecting the presence of film content stored in an interlaced signal). Just so it’s clear, here are the tests from the 60hz tests on the
Spears & Munsil disc:
- 2-2 (30fps inside 60i): Fail
- 2-2-2-4: Fail
- 2-3-2-3 PF-T (24fps inside 60i with MPEG metadata): Fail
- 2-3-2-3 (24fps inside 60i): Fail
- 2-3-2-3: Fail
- 2-3-3-2: Fail
- 3-2-3-2-2: Fail
- 5-5: Fail
- 6-4: Fail
- 8-7-8-7: Fail
- Time-adjusted: Fail
Likewise, for European users watching European content (BBC TV shows are an obvious example), it’s worth knowing that the Blu-ray format does not have provision for 25p, so all of this content is encoded at 50i, and accordingly falls foul of the PS4′s lack of deinterlacing capabilities. With 1080i HD content, this is actually not a gigantic problem, and we imagine most users won’t notice owed to the high HD resolution masking the resolution loss. It’s still poorer quality than many standalone players, however.
It’s a strange decision on Sony’s part, because when first launched, the PS3 system simply output 1080i content as 1080i (natively), meaning that the other components in the user’s AV system (AV receiver or TV) would do the deinterlacing. We’d hope this is something Sony addresses with a system update – either give us good deinterlacing with film mode detection, or just output the 1080i content as pure 1080i and let another device that has the same capabilities take care of it.
