Another Upconversion Questions?

Question

Yes I am asking about DVD upscaling again. No one has asked the right question yet. If you have a low resolution picture and blow it up it sucks. Is it not the same with an upconverter? You can not make pixels that did not exist before and that is what it seems an upconverter does. I understand the signal stay digital with the HDMI/DVI output, but will that make a noticeable difference? The right question is has anyone done a side-by-side comparison of a standard DVD player and an upconverter of the same class? You cannot comparare a cheap wal-mart SD to a 300.00 upconverter.

Answer 1

Actually Widescreen Review Magazine has done the comparison you referred to. The results generally were that the upconverted pictures were better, but there were differences between the players. The best pictures were obtained with high-end very expensive units. (Some of these were compared favorably to the new high-definition DVD formats ) But even consumer-lever units looked better. This is because most players do not output all of the quality inherent in the DVD digital recording. Conversion to analog and back introduces noise and other artifacts. Analog signals degrade in long cable runs. There are also other issues with respect to signal processing in the player that affect quality: often players will add edge-enhancement to their analog outputs to offset high frequency loss. The digital output in most cases do not have these issues, so while you can never get more resolution than in the original, at least you can get more of what's there.

Answer 2

Nope but If you haven't bought an HD set yet, here's a reason to wait: Future sets will be better at upconverting images to HD. Meanwhile, outboard video scalers can convert a 480i signal to 1080p. Models from Lumagen and DVDO range from $1000 to $2500.So even a 300$ upconverter now is still not sufficient enough.