I have a Panasonic HD plasma and am using my old JVC DVD/VHS player for DVD's. It does have progressive scan. The picture quality is great. Will a upconverting player like the Panasonic DVD-S97S with HDMI make a noticable difference?
eengert
Unregistered guest
Posted on
If the pic quality from your standard P-scan DVD player looks great, then your TV must be doing the upconversion from 480p to 720p or 1080i. In which case, I don't believe an up-converting DVD player will make any difference. It will simply be doing the up-conversion onboard and then sending the 720p or 1080i signal to your TV. The result will be the same. I think you can save yourself the money and don't need an up-converting DVD player.
I just went throught the same situation. I bought a Samsung 50" DLP. Then I bought an up-converting DVD player and compared with my standard P-scan DVD player. I can see no difference. I believe my TV does the same up-conversion that the up-converting DVD player does, so it's pointless to have the up-converting DVD player. I'm planning to return it. I have yet to hear an argument that cause me to think differently, though I'm open to them.
Upconverting and downconverting to fit your TV's native resolution is a very important with HD, but can be difficult to evaluate without actually having the equipment in the same room.
One would hope that the TV manufacturers would do a good job with the conversion processing to maximize image quality with anti-aliasing on upconverts and good algorithims for down converts. Also they have to make the processing fast enough that there is no perceptable delay of the video, otherwise the TV will be unusable with video games.
So my point is, that I could see a scenario where one has a TV with poor conversion capabilities and that person would like to purchase an upconverting DVD player with better conversion processing than their TV. eengert seems to have done this comparison and determined that both the DVD player and TV did an equal job with the upconversion. One thing to look to eengert is whether the TV or DVD player does a better job with jagged edges on diagonal images. Did you look really close for any difference in this area?
Unfortunately, most people won't be able to do this comparison before buying a DVD player, so we'll have to rely on review and here-say on the internet.