mini HD review (1 Viewer)

[GregH]

As I type I'm sitting in front of a 16'x19' screen watching HD off a Runco VX-3 (with an anamorphic lens) with a Sony SAT-HD100 and it looks pretty good. I'm mostly cycling between channel 199, a Sencore HD Loop and the Macy's Day parade OTA signal provided by Harris. On the other hand it's hard to say it completely blows away DVD. The player here is running though a Snell and Wilcox and looks nearly as stunning, even on non-anamorphic. I threw in Titan AE the other day for some people and they were completely in awe of the CG.
I think the main problem is that these people shooting HD are too used to 4:3 or something. They hardly ever take advantage of the extra width and it's so much easier to tell when a scene isn't quite in focus. Not to mention that the DVDs have such higher production values versus made for TV content. I'll just have to sit here a bit more and keep analyzing...
My main point is that it seems that jumping to HD doesn't have to quite spoil the DVD experience. With the right equipment DVD seems very competitive despite only being 480P natively (if that).
Having said all that I'm pretty desperate to get some more content to get up on the screen. Am I missing anything? We've got a Sencore, DirectTV (the loop and HBOHD) and the local stuff.

 

[Frank]

I suspect the reason you don't see much improvement with HDTV compared to the S&W output is because your display is limited to 1024x768.
I just tried looking at the PBS HDTV demo loop downconverted to 1024x768 via my Vigatec scaler. It can scale HDTV to various resolutions. The reduction in image quality compared to the native 1920x1080 is very obvious on my RGB monitor.
Frank