HD DVD player's upconversion quality? (1 Viewer)

Let me preface this by saying I was at BB and they had the demo running. The HD material looked awesome but what was freaking me out was that the sd upconverted looked great as well. They had Charlie and the chocolate factory playing and it looked VERY good, better than it did at home.

Now I don't know if it was because of the player or because it was a 1080p LCD they had it on, or a cobination of both. I have a upconverting dvd player at home, but it looks nothing like this. So my question is, does the Tosh HD DVD player do a better job upconverting than say the other SD upconverting dvd players out there like my Samsung player?

Greetings

The TOshiba HD player does better upconversion than the Samsung dvd players in my experience. Samsung performance has been poor in my book.

The players that use the faroudja chip tend to perform slightly better than the Toshiba hd player.

Regards

In your opinion Micheal do you think that the fact it was on a 1080p set played any part in making it look better? It was the Westinghouse lcd 1080p

Greetings

Proper deinterlacing of a 1080i signal into 1080p would help a bit. But it is also a smaller screen than you likely have at home so therefore denser ... brighter ... more punchy ...

One also never has the time to really scrutinize a display image on the floor. So often enough ... the perception of "sweetness" goes away once you give it some serious and critical viewing time.

Regards

Very good points Micheal you actually decribed to the 'T' what I couldn't put into words. Also I didn't consider the size of the screen, because more often than not the smaller the screen the better the picture looks. I guess because it doesn't have to work as hard and you don't see the imperfections magnified 100x over. Thanks.....and I do not fear the pink furry pig. ;-)

The upscaling on my A1 is phenomenally good.

It is ar better than any of the upscalers I had before, including Denon and Samsung.

Other users have reported it is better than the Oppo and Pioneer too.

Here's a thread that discusses the upscaling of these HD DVD players.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...3&page=1&pp=30

It was worth the money just for the upscaling, and I got a HD DVD player for free

Best A/V purchase I have ever made.

p.s. It also plays back audio at 96/24 - it upsamples CD and DVDs to this also - sounds fantastic.

Rob,

Which connection allows upsampling on CD's? I have my A1 going into my Denon 3806 via HDMI than to my TV.

The upscaling of my HD-A1 is good, but nowhere near what my combo Pioneer 79AVi at 480i over HDMI to a Gennum scaler was giving me with standard DVDs.

But since I just sold my Pio 79AVi to buy the upcoming Pioneer Elite Blu-Ray player (that will pass 480i over HDMI also for standard DVDs! ), the HD-A1 is doing a fine job with standard DVDs until then.

The HD-A1 is ok with regular material, but is having some problems with anime and tougher material. Jaggies and de-interlacing artifacts with those.

But for 500$, I can easily live with those shortcomings for now.

People are exagerating a bit about the upscaling capabilities of the HD-A1 IMHO. It's unbelievable with HD-DVDs, but I've seen better with regular DVDs.

I agree. I replaced an Oppo upconverting DVD player with the HD DVD player, and I think the upper hand on upconversion goes to Oppo, with a slightly sharper picture. Granted, SD DVD's look pretty darn good on the Tosh, they just looked a little better on the Oppo.

I had a question about the upscaling of the toshiba HD-DVD player. How does it upscale 4X3 material? Does it generate black bars on the sides or does it just upscale the picture stretched?

The reason I ask is that I just picked up a cheapie upscaling Toshiba SD player at Costco for $59.95. I'm happy with the upscaling to 720P it does on 16x9 material as I can now see it projected without any overscan. But it is useless with 4x3 material because it doesn't restore the proper geometry by adding side-bars. So for 4x3 material I have to use the projector's scaler which produces a significant amount of overscan.

by the way my projector is the BENQ pe-7700 which has native 720X1280 resolution.

It's pillarboxed.

Well I went ahead and bought the HD-A1, and while I was there I figured I minus well buy a 52" JVC HD-ILA Riddick in HD on the JVC was amazing, it was beautiful. The upconvertion of SD looks pretty good on the JVC.

Problem I have with this player is that HD DVD and SD DVD don't look much better on my Panny 500 pj. I don't know if it's because of the hdmi to DVI conversion on what. But I wasn't impressed. Maybe I should have watched it on the projector first before I did on the 52" so I would not have been let down because of the difference in quality.

I returned the HD-A1 because it defeated the purpose of me getting one if I can't watch it in my theater. That 52" is just a bed room tv. I think I'll get a hi definition player once the 1080p projectors come down in price.

Is the Panny 500 720p? Are you sure you had it all set up correctly? Did you try using the component connection on your Panny 500 instead of the HDMI?

My A1 looks absolutely fantastic with my Z3, the image quality is amazing.

Michael,

First of all, because of YOU I just ordered the Toshiba HD-A1
from TV AUTHORITY. I should have it by week's end.

Question for you, my friend....

Concerning upconversion....

Gregg Loewen has always told me that I would have a problem
with upconversion because of my Toshiba 57HX81.

I have steered away from buying a player that upconverts just
because I was told my TV would not display the upconversion
accordingly.

Can you verify this, and, let me know what sort of problems
I may experience?

My next question is, how do you make the Toshiba HD-A1
upconvert? Is there a simple switch on the unit or remote that
you press and instantly you are upconverting -or- is the process
more advanced than that?

I look forward to your reply.

Ron,

I'm not an authority by any means, but I am absolutely STUNNED by the PQ on SD-DVD (the HD-DVD goes without saying) on my Toshiba 46H84. As an example, a couple of weeks ago, I watched "Nobody's Fool", a character comedy/drama w/Paul Newman, bare bones DVD, fairly low budget, etc. and it was so good that I thought I was watching HD. The texture on the many plaid flannel shirts was rock solid and very palpable. I'm rediscovering my entire collection thanks to the HD-A1! As far as doing anything special, I'm just feeding the 1080i signal into the HDMI input of the set, that's all.

Hope this helps. Enjoy!

Ted

Ted,

I am extremely happy to hear of what upconversion is doing for
your SD collection.

My problem is that my set is 5 years old. No HDMI. My connection
will be through component. This is where I may be having a problem.

I'll see what the calibration experts say.

Ron,
On SD discs, you won't have any upconversion issues except from 480I to 480P because you can't upconvert to 720P nor 1080I except through the HDMI output.

This is all new to me guys.

I understand 1080i is the maximum most sets (including mine) will
display and that 1080p is the new maximum that the newest sets
are capable of producing.

Now...

I understand that through component I can enjoy HD-DVD in
1080i. That's good.

But what about SD-DVD? I have no clue how the upconversion
process works and just how good my SD DVDs will look with the
component hookup rather than HDMI.

Can someone take me through an easy-to-understand comparison?

I also look forward to MichaelTLV's response on upconversion
through my TV.

Thanks!

Ron,
Through your component output of the HD DVD player with SD discs, you can only upconvert 480I to 480P, that's it as far as upconverting any SD discs while using the component output on your player to either your television or audio component inputs.

I take it not a big difference then?

You have component, Crawdaddy, do you see any major difference
with the upconversion?