Chris-K

I'm a big fan of British television, and have a large collection of PAL DVDs. Recently, I upgraded my 32" TV to a 39".

For about the past decade, I've been using a Philips DVP642 as my region-free player. I've never had a TV that can support PAL, so the player takes the 576-line signal and "downconverts" it to 480 lines. Now, on the 32" I rarely noticed any additional picture defects, but with the 39" I see loads of stair-step patterning, particularly on interlaced material (and there's lots of that, as UK TV fans will know.)

I see outboard component-to-HDMI converters listed on Amazon as well as eBay. Surely, I'm not the only one here who has this kind of problem? One of them claims it's compatible with 576-lines, so I could conceivably set my Philips to output PAL sources in PAL and have the converter work with the higher resolution of PAL in upconverting.

Is this a feasible alternative to finding a region-free DVD or Blu-ray disc player? Has anyone here ever used one of these?

Here's one of the adapters I'm talking about.

Chris-K

Realized after I posted that that I won't be able to upconvert from PAL due to the different frame rate...

Spiky

There would be models that can convert the video, too. But they probably would cost more than a region-free player with HDMI.

Chris-K

I guess nobody has done this, but now that I've done a bit more research, I can't see the point as I can pick up an upscaling region-free player on eBay for about the same price as one of those.