Question Concering my Built in DVD Player and Upscaling DVDs
Question Concering my Built in DVD Player and Upscaling DVDs
I have a question that's been troubling me the last few days, so I thought someone here at UD would be able to provide me with an answer and this seemed the most sutible place to post it. I think next year probably around Summer time I'm officially going to upgarde to Blu-Ray and have been researching the format, and whilst doing that I started to read about upscaling DVDs and how you can buy specific players that when connected via a HDMI cable to a HD TV will convert a DVDs resolution of 480 to a near HD quality 720 or 1080. This intrests be greatly as it would give me less of a reason to upgrade the majority of my DVD collection, however I was wondering if my DVD player will automatically do this or not. I own a 19" HD TV (LOGIK is the make) and it had a built in DVD player, will the TV therefore automatically upscale my DVDs played as it's a HD TV? I personally think that my DVDs look pretty decent on it, however have no way of comparing DVDs played on that through another player at the same time. Also has anyone compared an upscaled DVD version of a film with a Blu-Ray on the same TV before, and if so is there a great difference in picture? Thanks to anyone that can provide any answers?
I love The Little Mermaid and Ariel
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KubrickFan
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Maybe you could check the settings of the dvd part? Maybe there's some option to give everything through in 1080p, or what other resolution your television has.
And frankly, I don't see the advantage of upscaling. There are people who say that upconverting dvds are just as good as some Blu-rays, but that's simply not true. It all depends on the dvd itself, really. If it's a new one, or animation, it will still look pretty good. But pick a title that's ten years old, and all the upscaling in the world isn't going to make that look any better.
Also some advice. You'd better watch out for the titles that are released now that you want to buy. If or when you buy a Blu-ray player, you might want to replace those dvds with Blu-rays and that way you would spend a lot more money unintentionally. It happened to me.
And frankly, I don't see the advantage of upscaling. There are people who say that upconverting dvds are just as good as some Blu-rays, but that's simply not true. It all depends on the dvd itself, really. If it's a new one, or animation, it will still look pretty good. But pick a title that's ten years old, and all the upscaling in the world isn't going to make that look any better.
Also some advice. You'd better watch out for the titles that are released now that you want to buy. If or when you buy a Blu-ray player, you might want to replace those dvds with Blu-rays and that way you would spend a lot more money unintentionally. It happened to me.
External upscaling probably doesn't matter these days as Televisions get better and better at upscaling SD images themselves. It depends when you got your HD TV, although I would imagine if your TV has a built-in DVD player it will have some form of upscaling.
Upscaling basically does what Photoshop does when you make an image larger - it rescales the image and fills in the new pixels with average colours based on the surrounding pixels. Of course, Photoshop does this reasonably quickly, but a TV has to do it to an image 50 times a second - so sometimes some shortcuts are used. This is historically why people prefer external upscalers (such as found in DVD or Blu-ray players) over their TV's native upscaling. Normally the external upscaling is superior.
But what's important is, upscaling can only "guess" what the expanded picture's pixels would be. A guess based on the surrounding pixels colour values. This can, and often does, work out perfectly fine - you'll definitely recognise an upscaled DVD image when comparing it with a non-upscaled DVD image.
But because its only "guessing" it often misses out on fine detail - details like fields of grass; texture or materials in clothing; hair; skin pores; leaves etc still look softened and blurry and look much better in native HD (like off a Blu-ray disc).
I'm going to be controversial now and say that for some forms of picture (especially simply coloured animation with lots of solid colour and reasonably thick lines) upscaled DVDs aren't drastically different than native HD.
However, as you would imaging, having all the picture information, rather than "guessing" results in a better picture 90%+ of the time.
Upscaling basically does what Photoshop does when you make an image larger - it rescales the image and fills in the new pixels with average colours based on the surrounding pixels. Of course, Photoshop does this reasonably quickly, but a TV has to do it to an image 50 times a second - so sometimes some shortcuts are used. This is historically why people prefer external upscalers (such as found in DVD or Blu-ray players) over their TV's native upscaling. Normally the external upscaling is superior.
But what's important is, upscaling can only "guess" what the expanded picture's pixels would be. A guess based on the surrounding pixels colour values. This can, and often does, work out perfectly fine - you'll definitely recognise an upscaled DVD image when comparing it with a non-upscaled DVD image.
But because its only "guessing" it often misses out on fine detail - details like fields of grass; texture or materials in clothing; hair; skin pores; leaves etc still look softened and blurry and look much better in native HD (like off a Blu-ray disc).
I'm going to be controversial now and say that for some forms of picture (especially simply coloured animation with lots of solid colour and reasonably thick lines) upscaled DVDs aren't drastically different than native HD.
However, as you would imaging, having all the picture information, rather than "guessing" results in a better picture 90%+ of the time.
Most of my Blu-ray collection some of my UK discs aren't on their database