What is the deal with Faroudja chipsets? (1 Viewer)

[Joe]

Can anyone explain why everyone is so excited about the Faroudja chipset? What does it do and what are the competitors? Thanks.

 

[Brae]

Joe, are you in the market for a projector? If not then don't worry about it. If it is, try Link Removed and do some reading.
Lets just say Faroudja is like BASF, they don't make your bed, they make your bed better.

 

[Sean M]

Faroudja makes hands down the best video deinterlacing algorithm (for the moment) that removes jaggies and stairstepping on video sourced material. Wonderful for sports like football and basketball as they have lots of lines on the field of play. They also provide video enahncements like cross color suppression for composite mastered sources on their more advanced chips.

Their lastest chip, the FLI2300 is a scaler on a chip performing deinterlacing, frame rate conversion and scaling on chip. This technology used to cost upwards of $25,000, but more recently has seen more sane pricing (a mere $4000 msrp for an NRS scaler). These chips will be mass produced and put into everything from projectors and HDTV's to DVD players and, potentially, PC cards. Their older chip, the FLI2200 (and I believe the 2220 video enhancer) already appears in a PC card, the Holograph 3D. The FLI2300 is also capable of accepting inputs up to and including 1080p and rescaling it to the desired resolution.

In the chip biz, their chief competitor it Silicon Image, though their chip, the Sil504 only deinterlaces and must be paired with another chip for scaling. It's quite good on film and video, but not the equal of the Faroudja chip for video deinterlacing. Faroudja's algorithm is called DCDi, as you may know if you followed the link.

Now the mod can move this thread to the display forum where it belongs.