 I am considering the Phillips upconvert DVD PLAYER which upscales to 1080i. The DVP5960 or DVP3960/37 (sold at Walmart) look good to me, I can see "almost HI DEF on my LCD AKAI T.V. they say. any one comment. I also know SAMSUNG has one is it better?
UPCONVERTER is it good?
Tue, 05/15/2007 - 19:40
#1
UPCONVERTER is it good?
This is a great question peanutball, and one that gets brought up frequently. I can certainly understand the confusion out there regarding upconversion on DVD players.
Upconversion is one of those hugely touted features that, though arguable, doesn't really do that much to help the image quality all that much. Fixed pixel HDTVs will upconvert internally anyway. The only factor is which does a better job, and the scalers in modern DVD players with upconversion typically beat out low and mid range fixed pixel TVs. Will it turn your regular DVD into HD quality? No. Will it make a marginal improvement? Maybe, but it really depends on how good your TV performs and how you configure the player. For example, upconverting to 1080i doesn't do you much good when you have a 720p TV. In this example, your picture may actually be worse since your DVD image is being scaled up to 1080i, then back down again to 720p by the television (double processing, adding artifacts, etc.) Processing once is better, so set your player to the rate that best matches your TV.
Remember, you can't "really" add resolution to an image if it's not there to begin with. Processing can do some cool things, but it won't perform miracles. If you want a truly high definition experience, you'll need to pick a format in the HD disc format war; HD-DVD or Blu-Ray.