Question re HD converters

[Brian Ellis]

There are, on the market, some DVD players which purportedly output the video as 1080i. Has anyone any experience of them? To me, it seems evident that you cannot show what isn't there in the first place. I assume they analyse each frame pixel-by-pixel and interpolate adjacent pixels by averaging. But is there any visual improvement at normal viewing distance?

As my 17 y-o TV rendered its soul recently, we have an HD-ready one now, but no HD signals! I'm certainly not ready to buy a BR or HD-DVD player yet, because of the Gulf war, the gulf being between the different technologies, not to mention we are not rich enough to buy the hardware or the discs.

[schmosef]

upconverting DVD players are crazy cheap here these days.

last i checked, you can get one for around $30.

if you want DIVX support and HDMI it will cost you a little more but it's still less than $100.

the image quality on my LG DVD player "feels" better than a non-upconverted picture.

i guess what i'm saying is that i'm not sure if i'd pay more for an upconverting DVD player because the prices are so low i over here that i don't have to make that decision.

[wkulecz]

Unless your HDTV has HDMI forget about up-converting DVD players -- they don't work over component.

How well they work depends on how good or bad the scaler in your 1080i HDTV is when fed 480p DVD source vs. the scaler in the upconverting DVD player.

--wally.

[Brian Ellis]

Thanks, it does have HDMI. Are you saying that a 576i signal is upscaled in HDTVs, anyway? I must admit I was surprised at not seeing lines and the pic looked better than I anticipated (except for moving objects).

[paulw]

As my 17 y-o TV rendered its soul recently, we have an HD-ready one now, but no HD signals! I'm certainly not ready to buy a BR or HD-DVD player yet, because of the Gulf war, the gulf being between the different technologies, not to mention we are not rich enough to buy the hardware or the discs.

Brian,

As one who is going down this road what size, type and make did you buy??

[Nowhere]

schmo, I think that theoretically nothing prevents this "upsampled" DVDs to look a bit better indeed (hmm...Warpsharp in ffdshow does make Xvids look a bit, well...sharper after all)

[Brian Ellis]

Jvc Lt-32a80su 32"

[wkulecz]

Yes the sets have a "native" pixel resolution that everything is scaled to. Our first HDTV cable box had a switch to output 480p, 720p, 1080i, or "native" which meant "as brodacast". Playing with this, using the scaler in our Toshiba HDTV was clearly better than having the cable box output everything as 1080i.

Its worth spending some time permuting the possibilities and going with what looks best.

All it takes is a little playing around with Photoshop or the Gimp resizing a good quality 640x480 image to see that upscaling by 2-4X can still look really good, as long as you don't have the original higher resolution image to compare it to

--wally.

[paulw]

Jvc Lt-32a80su 32"

Thanx Brian

Only 32" ?? I thought you would be at least a 42" guy..

[Brian Ellis]

Wife has tunnel vision!