For the person who just has to have everything, or is willing to spend more money to stick with DVD than cave in and buy two separate high definition players (or not), Rotel has announced the forthcoming RVD-1093 upscaling DVD player. The high-end boutique has cranked out yet another snazzy looking standalone flagship device, which touts 1080p upcoverting, a built-in scaler, HDMI, component / S-Video / composite outputs, and silkly smooth progressive scan playback. Additionally, the device plays nice with recordable discs, SVCDs, JPEGs, MP3 / WMA CDs, and even the lost-but-not-forgotten DVD-Audio format. To somewhat justify the lofty pricetag, the company points to its "switching power supply" which reportedly touts "an advanced pulse circuit and individually regulated supply stages to generate optimal voltages," and also boasts about the wideband DA converters, "Adaptive Geometrical Chroma Mapping," optical / coaxial digital audio outs, NTSC / PAL-compatibility, RS-232 interface, and discrete IR commands. We're still not entirely convinced this player is worth the $1,499 asking price, especially considering the forthcoming price drops in the Blu-ray arena, but those still interested can pick one up sometime this quarter.

We're not quite sure what is so HD about 480p upconverted DVDs, but Xploder has followed up its HDTV Game Player for PS2 announcement with the the HDTV Movie Player for PS2. While we took the news that a set of component cables and a memory card setting could suddenly improve the resolution of your Playstation 2 games beyond their original capabilities with a grain of salt, this is even more confusing. Every Playstation 2 since the SPCH-50000 revision three years ago is capable of progressive scan 480p DVD playback when equipped with component cables already. That makes this product totally unnecessary for many owners, and of course we have to question if it will work properly with older model PS2's that didn't support 480p for movies, only for gaming.

I remember trading in my PS2 immediately in 2003 when the SPCH-5000 came out for progressive scan DVD support, you can check the model # to see if yours is supported, or just look at the front. If it is missing the FireWire port you should be all set for 480p with the right cables and a change of a setting. With all the attention the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 are giving to the HD Era, this may be an unfortunate grab to turn some of that attention into sales of unneeded stopgap hardware.

This site is targeted towards people looking for information on video compression, but their information on de-interlacing, how it works and the various challenges faced can give you a lot of information on what your TV or media player is doing when upconverting content. If you can't understand why some people get so up in arms over the 1080p-or-not debate, or why SD content can look so bad on your brand new HDTV, take a look and be educated. There are a lot of ways to get around resizing and upconverting content, and some are better than others (blending fields, adaptive, bob, bob and weave or progressive scan, motion compensation or motion adaptive just to name a few).

[Via DV Guru]