What is....

[jamison162]

Macro-blocking, the chroma bug, etc.???

[edtyct]

To put it simply, macroblocking consists of blotchy patches in uniformly colored backgrounds. It is an artifact of certain deinterlacers/scalers, apparently more in evidence with some displays than others. The ones that have to do a great deal of internal scaling to make an incoming signal conform to a native resolution are particularly susceptible.

The chroma bug or chroma upsampling error (CUE) is another common artifact of processing. It shows itself as jagged, broken areas within colored areas, especially on diagonal lines. The cause is inadequate sampling of color data (hence "chroma"), commonly in DVD and MPEG applications. It has been detected in a wide range of DVD players over the last few years. The Secrets of Home Theater site explains both of these defects and indicates which products suffer from them in their benchmark tests.

Ed