New Upconverting DVD Player, PS3 or Standalone Blu-Ray?? (1 Viewer)

[RogerH]

I recently purchased a 32" LCD HDTV and I'm very very happy with it (getting the HD cable box this week). However I'm kind of disappointed with the way my dvds look. On my old 26" TV everything looked great using a s-video connection. But now that I have it hooked up via component cables on my HDTV its not looking as good.

So I guess my question is which would be the better buy:
* A new upconverting DVD Player with a HDMI connection.
* A PS3 (which I would probably only use as a dvd/blu-ray player) since it seems like a good blu-ray player is included.
* A standalone blu-ray player.... the only problem with this is the price around here for standalone blu-ray players are still expensive.

Also I tried my dvds on my 360 (using the HDMI connection) but they still didn't look any better so I guess the 360 can't upconvert?? Or can it??

btw the current player is a Panasonic RV32

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Your TV is already scaling your DVDs to its native resolution, in effect "upconverting" them. Unless the set has a cheap scaler/deinterlacer, it is questionable how much improvement you'd see with an upconverting DVD player. Have you calibrated the set using Avia Guide to Home Theater or Digital Video Essentials? You can't really judge any set based on its out of the box settings, which are universally awful, designed as they are to make a TV stand out among dozens of others on a store display floor. Until and unless you calibrate the set you're likely to be even more disappointed in you HD cable (and especially your SD cable) than you are in your DVDs.

I have a 720p LCoS RPTV and a Sony DVD changer that upconverts over one output and doesn't over the other. Most of my DVDs look great over either one - I can't tell the difference between them. (Some older, poorly-mastered DVDs don't look very good, just as many low-res TV signals look like crap on my set, but that's a problem with the source, not the display.)

A well-mastered series like CSI looks almost as good on SD-DVD as it does on HD cable on my set. You should get similar results once your set is dialed in properly.

Regards,

Joe