What will look better for DVD? A TV that upscales to 720p or 1080i (1 Viewer)

[Rolando]

As far as I know no matter what signal you send to your TV it almost never displays it that way. It will scale it to something.

My CRT RPTV upscales it all to 1080i. whether you send a 1080i or 720 HD signal or a crappy VHS signal through the antenna input.

Same for many LCD/DLP who always display at 720p or a derivative of.

So on which will a DVD look better?

of course this is theoritically assuming a good scaler in the units. or if there is a good one on your DVD player which would be best?

 

[John S]

If all the scalling is equivelent. I am going to say they PQ will be equivelent.

I do find many modern displays, especially 720p-ish HD DPL and LCD RP units to truly excel with being fed 480i via component video and then using it's own de-interlacer and scaler for native res display.

 

[trey-m]

If you do a little searching about upscaling you'll find many posts on this subject- in fact I had a similar thread about a week ago.

In your particular case, if your DVD player has upscaling ability, then you will want to try sending a 480i from the DVD player (to use the TV's upscaler) and compare to sending a 1080i (to use the DVD's upscaler). See which one you like better and stick with that one. If your TV can accept a progressive input than you can also try progressive out from the DVD- giving you at least 4 combinations to try. Note that if both upscalers are about equal in quality you may not see much difference at all.

My guess is that with a middle of the road DVD player and TV, if you use an analog connection from the DVD player to the TV (component cable for example), then you will probably get better results using the DVD's upscaling. With a digital connection it's likely a tossup, with slight leaning still towards the DVD player- but only because the new DVD players use upscaling as a marketing tool- and I would guess that the manufacturers expect that people will request to see the difference between regular and DVD upscaling in the showroom- so it seems logical that there should be a noticeable difference...

 

[Allan Jayne]

Upscaling in a DVD player properly consists of two processes, de-interlacing, and scaling per se.

De-interlacing is the more difficult of the two processes and deficiencies are often not noticed until after you buy the player and bring it home.

A DVD player that does upscaling to HDTV format but which has not so good de-interlacing is likely to give a poorer picture than a player that has good de-interlacing but no upscaling, letting the TV do the upscaling.

Do a Google search for Stacy Spears Shootout Secrets and check out some of the DVD player reviews there.

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