Question about poor transfers and Upscaling vs. HD players
 

Well, I've got around 500 DVD titles at this time and I really don't plan to upgrade to HD-DVD or Blu-Ray until the war is over, but a general question. If you have something which is a poor transfer right out of the box (for example MacGyver Season Sets) or the old Jet Li - "Black Mask" DVD - then what does an upscaling DVD player AND an HD-DVD player make these kinds of transfers look like? Is it worse, the same or better than a normal DVD Player?

Better, but not that much better.

Agreed, a bad transfer will look bad whether it's in 480p or 1080p.

The bigger your set is the more the suck will shine through. Shitty transfers don't get any help especially when you are watching them on the big screen. I was watching some of the SCTV episodes on my big screen tv through an upconvert player and it didn't look very good. It was nowhere near unwatchable but it surely wasn't spectacular either.

I find that a large HDTV is much less forgiving to bad transfers. IMO, any small advantages gained in upconversion are outweighed by the magnification of transfer flaws, artifacts, etc.

Thanks to those who replied.

danwiz

very informative people, thank you.

great little topic dan.

The larger the image (as pointed out above) the more obvious it will be that those flaws exist. And, ironically, in some cases, the better the equipment, the more apt it is that you will notice those flaws.

Today's digital sets -- especially the high definition ones -- are much better at displaying each and every pixel without interference, or or the sort of picture flaws we got used to with older analog sets (ghosting, banding, line interference, etc.) This also means they are much better at showing you exactly how "bad" a bad picture really is.

Note the irony in this -- a TV set so good that it can actually look WORSE when you pop in a terrible DVD. Why?

That old cheaper analog set from 1983 had issues of its own that were so obvious you could not even concentrate on the individual hairs on someone's head, or the beautiful blades of grass on that ball diamond. You were too distracted by the picture noise from the TV, the ghosting from the antenna or cable TV line, the blooming from the TV contrast ratio, etc.

The better (and more expensive) scalers can sometimes help when it comes to this issue, since they have better circuits which will use more complex algorhytms to try to correct for errors as they upscale. Instead of examining the picture two pixels over in every direction, and analyzing them to make a decision, they may examine the picture 10 pixels over in every direction, and analyze those, and also analyze the four frames that preceded this one, and the next two frames which will follow, before using better logic to make the best possble choices. That is what good scalers can do.

However, if the image is pretty lousy, then the odds are the it is also full of problems 10 pixels over, and also on the frames before and after.

Garbage in usually still means (mostly) garbage out.

GIGO forever.

Take care,

-Bruce