Progressive VS. S-Video Help! (1 Viewer)

[Mao]

Okay, I've had the Hitachi 53" widescreen for a bit and have been running my trusty old Panasonic A120 (a dinosaur, but still works like a charm!) through S-video and have been fine with it.

I figured after all I'd heard about Prog. Scan players and component cables (and that I was nuts not to have upgraded by now), I went out and snagged the Panasonic RP-82 and an $90 set of Monster Cables....

Either I've expected the second coming or I ain't got it hooked up right, but I don't see a huge difference in picture quality....ideas or thoughts?

 

[Frank Zimkas]

Not sure about your rp-82 but my Pioneer Elite DV-47a has an on screen setup menu that allows you to select "Progressive" vs. interlaced. Is it possible that you need to double check your setup choices? I noticed a huge difference when watching some of my old favorites. Is your TV capable of delivering a 480p picture, or interlaced only?

 

[Jorge M]

Assuming that everything is set up correctly, you are now comparing the line-doubling circuitry in the TV versus the one in the DVD player. If your TV's processor is decent, you should not be able to see a huge difference.

Let me explain. When you were feeding your HDTV ready TV an interlaced image, it was doubling the number of lines and displaying it as 480p. If your TV has 3:2 pulldown circuitry, then it was doing some more trickery on film-based interlaced sources.

Now that you have a progressive scan DVD player, you're feeding the TV 480p, which bypasses the TV's circuitry and is displayed directly. Of course, the image is still being processed, only now it's in the DVD player.

Some of the advantages: the processing introduces less errors because the image is converted from analog to digital less times, and the 3:2 pulldown is done using the flags in the DVD (if available).

Bottom line: you now have a better setup, and it should look better, if only marginally so.

 

[Adam Bluhm]

I was thinking the same thing Frank mentioned..

.. is your TV capable of 480p? Is it just an analog set?

 

[GeorgeAB]

Another issue that has received little coverage in the forums and industry press deals with the way component video is implemented in video devices. In some equipment the S-Video circuit may actually look better than component, even though, theoretically, this should not be the case. This latest issue of Widescreen Review has an article by Joe Kane on this topic that is a real eye-openner. He will be including test material in the upcoming 'Digital Video Essentials' that will readily reveal to the untrained eye if the component video circuit in a device was designed correctly or not.
Best regards and beautiful pictures,
G. Alan Brown, President
CinemaQuest, Inc.
Insist on HDTV!

 

[Mao]

Thanks so much for your comments so far!

Maybe I'm not giving it enough time, but I just thought that the difference would be very dramatic! I've been opposed to blowing $90 bucks on cables (I just couldn't bring myself to go for the $200 ones), unless there was a huge difference.

I'm positive that it's capable of doing 480p (In one of the tv setup menus, it asks for a "Video Display" choice of 1080i or 540P...which doesn't seem to matter what I choose, [am I wrong here,too?]).

The TV's "Theater Modes" (News,Movies,Music,Sports) is set up to activate 3:2 pulldown automatically when in the "Movies" mode, which I've been using all along. Could this be a conflict?

 

[Boka]

I believe you have one of the new Hitachi HDTV's. The model number should end in 20b. From what I have read their internal line doubler and 3:2 pulldown is very good. Because the internal components have been doing a good job at making progressive scan out of an interlaced source, you may not notice any difference now that an external component is doing it.