Page 1 of Upscaling non HD

i`ve just bought a 46 inch samsung 1080p lcd and am looking to get the best out of Non HD sources (Standard DVD`s and Sky + which are currently connected via scart)

i am looking at the Panasonic DMR-EX77EB (which upscales to 1080p) which i would connect to the tv via HDMI and would be grateful if anyone could help with the following

if i plug my Sky+ box via Scart into the Panny would the picture be improved ?
does the upscaling make a great deal of difference to standard dvd`s ?

Any advice would be apreciated

cheers
mortal

I can`t answer your first question as not tried it, our sky+ goes straight to the TV by RGB scart, picture is very good so not tried anything different.

As for the upscalling it depend on the disk, we have a Samsung DVD-R155 and a Samsung 40" Lcd, it will upscale to 1080i or 720p, currently set to 720p.

Some films look amazing, Pirates of Caribean, Star Wars, mainly any big budget or animated film.

Others look absolutely terrible, older films or ones with a lot of black areas and bright areas in the same scene, the darker sections go blocky. one of the worst is High School Musical 1, Disney must have filmed it with all the kids having a nice healthy orange glow, with their bright orange skin and bright orange clothes any dark areas, night sky etc, look terrible.

All the best

Gerald.

Most decent LCD TVs have scalers in them that are as good as those in low to mid-range DVD players. The only real benefit of scaling before you feed the TV with these players is that you can then do 1:1 pixel mapping of the image. I have an Oppo DVD player, which is a pretty good scaler/deinterlacer, but my TV does pretty much the same thing (the Toshiba I have has very good scaling).

It makes sense to let the DVD player do the upscaling if it`s good enough at it, otherwise the TV has to de-interlace (unless you are feeding it component video) the signal, match the right fields together from the right frames (so often they get it wrong :(), and then work it`s magic on an already degraded analogue signal.

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Thanks for your comments guys. I am trying to borrow one off a mate to try it out. Will update later

Best to read reviews of the hardware you already have and intend to buy. The Sammy might very well have good scaling and deinterlacing (with accurate 2-2 and 2-3 pulldown detection), but I don`t know which model you have. Cheap DVD players often do a very poor job with 2-2 (PAL) material, but are generally okay with 2-3 (NTSC).

Well this is good news. Just read Chris` post and checked the specs of my Tosh 37X3030 which says it has Standard TV up-scaling. So, for the record what equivalent standard of upscaling does it give - 720p, 1080i or 1080p(which is what the Tv is). Also, I`m still not using component leads for DVD/TV connection so I`ll have to get my hands on a set asap. Can I assume this will improve the DVD picture further? Finally, any ideas where I can get a cheap/decent set of component cables.

Thanks folks
Pete :)

P.S. Chris, do i need to adjust TV settings for the upscaling or is this automatic?

This item was edited on Sunday, 24th February 2008, 21:09

Panels have what they call `native resolutions`, which in your case is 1920x1080. Because LCD technology is fixed-pixel - in that the number of pixels remains constant regardless of the resolution of the source material - anything that the TV shows has to be scaled to the native res. All upscaling DVD players do is convert the image to the res of your TV before passing it on, but all LCDs have scalers built in. Toshiba scalers tend to be a bit better than the ones you get in cheap TVs and DVD players though. You don`t have to do anything to make it scale - even if you fed it with 720p it would still have to show it using all 1080 lines. With PAL TV it will take the 576 lines, scale and deinterlace the image for display.

The only benefit of having the source scaled to 1080i/p before sending it to the TV is that you could enable 1:1 pixel mapping to get rid of overscan. Depends whether you think it`s worth it really.

Many thanks Chris.
Pete :)