What is upscale?

Question

Whats does upscale mean. I've heard of people talking about how blu-ray can upscale regular dvd's to hd. That means?

Answer 1

Here's hopefully a short and understandable answer. DVDs have 480 lines of resolution. Blu Rays (or HD DVDs) have 1080. The best TVs on the market can show 1080 lines of resolution (some do not). If you have a good enough TV and the right kind of player, you can display DVDs in 1080 lines of resolution.

How? Essentially it's a computer program to guess and try and fill in the extra information missing from the DVD coding. It's an approximation of what the missing information should be. It'll never be as a good as true 1080 content (like Blu Rays), but it should look better than just seeing 480 lines of resolution. This upscaling technique (also sometimes called upconverting) works best on animated films, since colors tend to be more uniform in them.

Note: to actually get the benefits of upscaling, you need to make sure your player is properly hooked up to your TV via HDMI. Having an upscaling player and proper TV is not enough. Make sure it is hooked up properly will all the correct settings (many people don't do this part).

Answer 2

A regular DVD picture is 720x480 pixels.
An HD picture can be as high as 1920x1080 pixels.

When you play a regular DVD in a Blu-Ray, HD, or even upconverting player, you have the option to output the video in 720 (1280x720) or higher resolution (1920x1080). In that case, the player upscales the video. It can use simple pixel duplication, or more sophisticated interpolation techniques.

However, every HDTV can upconvert/upscale the input from a regular DVD player using the same algorithms. Sometimes the player can do a better job, but sometimes the TV can do better than the player. It all depends on the video processor used.

Answer 3

Thats called a gimmick, there is no possible way to improve an original encode to make it better then the original. Perhaps viewed on a very large screen certain dithering filters will improve the look but it will not be true HD not by a long shot.