About Upscalers (1 Viewer)

[carlosC]

Trying to get the skinny on upscalers and viewing programs in 1080p. A friend said he was in an electronics store and talked to a salesperson who said the feed to all the HD displays in the store comes a computer hard drive that sends the data to a software based upscaler made my microsoft that upscales the signal to 1080p. I'm thinking my friend is a bit confused as I have searched and found nothing on any software based upscaler made by microsoft.
Next, how much do I need to spend in order to watch 1080p programming that has been upscaled. These upscalers, what kinds of programming do they upscale, DVD's, regular television broadcasts? Thanks for any info in this.

 

[John S]

Hmm may have been technically correct on all 1080p digital panels where everything is upscaled to 1080p for display.

 

[Dick Knisely]

Well, my personal BS detector just went into full alarm state.

 

[VinceL]

well, not all HDTV's are capable of displaying 1080p. Actually only a select few that have a native resolution of 1920x1080 can display true 1080p signals. Most other HDTV's are rated at about 1280x720, so the most they can display is a true 720p signal, but these tv's are able to process and display higher res stuff at 1080i also. I'm not really sure what the sales guy meant by having 1080p signals upscaled, since 1080p is already the highest quality stuff you can get. To answer your question tho, if you want to be able to see true 1080p HD video, you'll need a TV capable of 1920x1080 resolution. They are not hard to find, just hard to part with your money for.

Hope this helps...

 

[Allan Jayne]

A few ways to view 1080i shows in near 1080p quality:

1. Buy a Sony SXRD series TV.

2. Buy any HDTV tuner (roughly $250.), a Lumagen HDP upscaler ($1500.), and any 1080p TV with HDCP compliant 1080p input (not sure the cost). You can get away with a 1280x1024 (UGA?) computer monitor instead of a TV. You can hook up an HD DVD player when that is released.

Don't go out of your way to get 1080p if all you are going to watch is regular DVD even though many upscalers including this Lumagen do a superb job turning DVD and ordinary TV shows into 1080p format.

Video hints:
http://members.aol.com/ajaynejr/hdtvnot.htm

 

[ChrisWiggles]

I'm not really aware of software based scaling besides FFDshow scaling, he may have been talking about feeding VMR9 in windows to the video card, you can use your PC as a video processor/scaler very effectively, and there are some very high-quality solutions for this. I use a PC-based server system to feed and process all my content to my display, and it is of exceptional quality.