What does "hi-scan" mean? (1 Viewer)

[Michael Cook]

What is hi scan? what does it do? Is it important?

Thanks

 

[Peter Loan]

It's Sony's term for crappy line doubler. Seriously, Sony likes to name features such as "Wega" for flatscreen. I believe you mean the "Hi Scan" logo that appears on Sony TVs, which does indicate that it does upconvert interlaced images to 480p or 1080i. The vast majority of HD ready sets include this feature and do a much better job of it than the Sony sets.

 

[Michael Cook]

Thanks, a guy at work was asking me what it meant. He is looking at a Sony 36" HDTV (newest model) and was wondering what it meant.

 

[Brent Hutto]

FWIW, I have the TV you're probably referring to (36XBR800) and the deinterlacing/upconversion works very well. Comparing 480i to 480p output from my RP82 DVD player, there's only a smidgen of a difference in favor of the progressive-scan output from the player.

Like most HD-ready sets, overcompressed satellite and noisy cable signal looks pretty poor on the 36XBR800. It has been said that some other brands do slightly better on material with these problems but I've not had the opportunity to experience such a comparison first-hand. On DVD material, though, the Sony "line doubler" works very well.

 

[Michael Cook]

So it takes a 480i and makes it 480p ?? so if you were to have a no progressive scan dvd player, it would make the picture very close to the same look as an actual progressive scan player?? On regular non HDTV, it doesn't do much?

 

[Jorge M]

Actually, I think the image is upconverted to 960i. And by the way, the above responses are wrong. Sony's name for its line doubler is "Digital Reality Creation" or DRC. Hi-Scan is Sony's name for its HDTV ready TVs.

 

[Brent Hutto]

Jorge is correct that "Hi-Scan" is just the name of the current line of HD-ready sets. He is also correct that 480i input eventually gets all the way up to 960i. That is actually two different stages, though. The 480i to 480p step is done by the "Digital Reality Creation" circuitry and then the 480p to 960i step is called something like "Multi-Image Driver". Or something like that, I can't recall all the details. Doesn't matter, it ends up as 960i one way or another.

Michael, yes, that's what I'm saying. With the current-model new-and-improved DRC thingy in the Sony sets you're pretty well off letting the TV convert 480i into 480p for you rather than having a progressive-scan DVD player. Mind you, I still went out and bought a Panasonic RP82 but that was sheer irrational exuberance. After careful A-B comparison, I'm sure that I can tell a difference in certain scenes. And the difference is obvious on artifical test patterns like those provided by Avia. But you could watch 480i DVD output on this TV all day and not be disappointed.

As for non-DVD content, the process of "filling in the blanks" to get high-bandwidth 1080i from overcompressed satellite or noisy analog cable TV really makes matters worse. Of course, magnifying that sort of crummy picture up to 36" would look bad even on an NTSC analog set that didn't do any upconversion.

 

[Michael Cook]

Thanks for the info guys. Makes sense now.

 

[Allan Jayne]

As viewed, 960i is the same as 480p except that alternating video frames are staggered slightly on the picture tube. Some TV sets do this stagger, some don't, some due to less than perfect electronics have the stagger drift into and out of existence.
The TV must stagger the 1080i fields otherwise you would see 540p instead of 1080i. One 1080i field is roughly equivalent to one 480p frame.
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