All things being equal, a DVD player will have the scaling advantage over either an outboard scaler or a display simply because it has the raw digital data to work with. It's way to complicated to get into here, but a player that does this properly, such as the reasonably priced OPPO, does wonders ... far from a "gimick."
This article is simplistic at best. First off, MOST HDTVs today CAN display a 1:1 pixel ratio at either 720p or 1080p. The double scaling is old news.
That said, using a OPPO DVD player to upconvert to 720p on a 2nd gen 37 inch Vizio (or Westinghouse) is a good idea because the chip in the OPPO is superior to the chip in the Vizio and it will play out at native 1:1 720p.
All to the good!
What makes no sense (and I've seen this done) is upconverting a DVD to 1080i and then letting the TV do a downsqueeze back down to fit the display. This ends up being the worst of both worlds. Artifacts introduced in the upconvert are then used as picture elements in the downconvert. Whoops.
For those with a better chip in the TV, the lossless digital signal traveling at 480i or 480p over HDMI will give the TV's chip a better (and lossless) signal to work with.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Joseph Moore @ May 17th 2007 12:16AM
All things being equal, a DVD player will have the scaling advantage over either an outboard scaler or a display simply because it has the raw digital data to work with. It's way to complicated to get into here, but a player that does this properly, such as the reasonably priced OPPO, does wonders ... far from a "gimick."
rmcgraw @ Jun 30th 2007 3:43AM
This article is simplistic at best. First off, MOST HDTVs today CAN display a 1:1 pixel ratio at either 720p or 1080p. The double scaling is old news.
That said, using a OPPO DVD player to upconvert to 720p on a 2nd gen 37 inch Vizio (or Westinghouse) is a good idea because the chip in the OPPO is superior to the chip in the Vizio and it will play out at native 1:1 720p.
All to the good!
What makes no sense (and I've seen this done) is upconverting a DVD to 1080i and then letting the TV do a downsqueeze back down to fit the display. This ends up being the worst of both worlds. Artifacts introduced in the upconvert are then used as picture elements in the downconvert. Whoops.
For those with a better chip in the TV, the lossless digital signal traveling at 480i or 480p over HDMI will give the TV's chip a better (and lossless) signal to work with.