So I recently brought home a new 42WE610, and have been basking in its beautiful, high-res glow. However, after hooking up my DVD player to it, I discovered that my player - a Sony S550D from ages past, isn't progressive-scan. Bummer.
So, I was deliberating whether to hold out for a year or so until high-def DVD players hit the market en masse, or buy myself a low-end progressive scan player now to tide me over. (Spending more than $100 now on a player that's only going to be used for a year or so is a major no-no, so sayeth the wife.) My office has a couple DVD players lying around, and I decided to bring one home to see what sort of difference I'd see - if it wasn't dramatic, then I'd just wait.
So I lugged home a Sony DV-PNS575P, and hooked it up. Popped in Finding Nemo to start, and set the switch to "interlaced" so that I'd start off in "before" mode. Got it going, then switched to "progressive", and... Well, nothing. Whatever word means the precise opposite of "blown away", that word best describes my reaction. But it goes beyond that.
I saw absolutely no difference. At all.
Now, I'm far from a video expert, and I don't have finely-tuned eagle eyes, or anything, but I'm not completely oblivious to small changes in video quality. I spent a good 15 minutes trying to find some difference, some pixel somewhere that looked prettier in progressive mode, and I came away with nothing. I tried a couple other movies, and still could spot not a single dot of change at all. (Though I did determine that the PNS575P produced a better image than my old S550D - I chalk it up to the 12-bit DAC.)
I spent some times trying to see if I was doing something wrong, if I had to tell the TV to accept a progressive image, if there was a menu setting on the player that needed to be tweaked,, but in the end, it seemed I was doing everything right. Shouldn't I have seen SOME degree of improvement?
The best explanation I could come up with is that whatever means the TV is using to take the interlaced image from the DVD player and convert it to its native 788p display, it must be just as good as the converter within the DVD player. Could that be the case? Was I doing something wrong? Am I just blind?