A question about progressive scan. (1 Viewer)

I was at a local high-end audio/video store wanting to buy a new DVD player. I was looking for a progressive scan DVD player because I plan on upgrading my T.V. soon and want to take advantage of the higher resolution. The salesman said that if my T.V. has progressive scan capability built-in, I wouldn't need it for the DVD player since the T.V.'s progressive scan unit would probably be superior to the DVD player's. Is this true or do I need a progressive scan DVD player AND a T.V. able to take advantage of it? Thanks.

It is usualy the other way around... the DVD player's progressive capabilities are better than the "doubling" capabilities of your display device. The kind of things to watch for are shimmer on subtitles, and interaction of small lines with each other in close proximity (movement) that should disappear with the progressive turned on at the DVd player. You have to look very close for it but the bigger the display, the easier to spot it.

See this thread. It is basically asking the exact sanme question...Will progressive scan fix this?

It really depends on the quality of the deinterlacing chip in the DVD player vs. your TV's deinterlacing chip. Sadly, many DVD player manufacturers are supplying mediocre-to-poor chips (see Home Theater Secret's reviews) and it's only getting worse as the manufacturers try to sink their prices down in order to compete with Chinese companies like Apex.

If you use your TV to deinterlace, you can lose about 5 lines of resolution as it's being done in the analog domain. Of course, whether or not you can actually SEE the loss in resolution is a different matter. I have great eyesight but I couldn't tell the difference when I switched a Panasonic RP82 from progressive to interlaced mode. The RP82 wasn't mine, and I missed buying one before they sold out, so I've been getting along with my interlaced Panny RV41. The only difference I noticed between the RV41 and the RP82 (in progressive mode) is that "bad edits" normally seen in TV shows combed for one frame using my Sony KP43HT20 TV as the deinterlacer, whereas the RP82 had no combing whatsoever. Unfortunately, most progressive DVD players (particularly the cheap ones coming out this year) probably won't be able to handle the bad-edit combing problem. On top of that, the chroma upsampling error is virtually being ignored by DVD manufacturers, and it tears me up inside that Panasonic may be falling into that gutter. I think that the chroma error goes away on some progressive players if you switch to interlaced mode, but that pretty much defeats the purpose of buying one in the first place.

Hope this helps,
Ryan