LOTR: HD vs. SD Comparisons
 

I found this link while digging through my IE browser that I don't use anymore. This is POTENTIALLY what kind of improvement the upcoming HD versions of these movies would look like.

Enjoy.

http://www.cornbread.org/FOTRCompare/

Notice especially the color shift. I always thought that the FOTR was especially "yellowish green". The HD version seems to improve the color accuracy and sharpness a great deal.

I love the foliage detail, especially in shot 5. I wish the people that I talk to at work about HD could at least see these images. They just don't see how HD can be better than DVD. I tell them it's like going from VHS to DVD.

Aww, nuts. I just got slobber all over my keyboard!:)

Holy guacamole, folks -- that's just gonna be amazing!

Not to be Mr. Spoil the thread guy, but this has been shown here and at other av boards many times before.

I know I've seen those before, but it's nice to be reminded of it. I think 1, 3, 6, and 8 are the most obvious improvements.

Ive never seen any Lord of the Rings movies....

People here have been banned for less.

If you ran those SD pics through a few more pointless processes to further worsen the quality, HD would look even better!!

I don't recall the SD quality looking that bad.

You're right. The SD looks a little bit blurry. I don't remember that with my EE DVD.

SD over a pure digital connection (DVI or HDMI) looks a lot better than that.

Yeah, like seeing all of them and thinking "meh...what's the big deal?" :wave:

also the SD are 480i deinterlaced...
The HD are 1080i scaled down to 480p
so technically they have twice the capacity for detail.
A cool comparison would be to scale down the HD to 480i and then de-interlace. and see if it comes out better... I should because the compression artifacts in the SD version wouldn't be there.

I have a sony kv-32hs420 and an Oppo 970hd dvd player w/the firmware that corrects the Mediatek compression issue when upconverting past 480p. The LOTR EE looks pretty much like the photos.
J

Are there any similar shots (not just of LOTR) that compare SD to upconverted SD to HD?

i want to see a comparison of the same frame of a movie on vhs, dvd, and hd

Wow, those HD pictures look great especially next to their SD counterpart.
I also agree with the "fellowship" in this thread...my picture looked better than these SD pictures, but that was an upconversion to 720P.

What are you talking about? Those HD pics are HD, the DVD pics were uprezzed to match by Photoshop, poorly.

And comparing HD to DVD at 480 resolution is NOT a cool comparison. That's like comparing a Lion's Tap hamburger to a McDonald's hamburger by throwing the one from Lion's Tap on the floor and walking on it first.

(Lion's Tap is a local bar that makes the best burgers in town)

duh.
HD is going to look better than SD.
This test compaired SD to HD in HD resolution. No shit it's going to look better. why was this even done? Let's race a stock prius against a 911 next and see who wins.

I'm saying it would be interesting to see if even sampled down to the SD playing feild that HD can provide more detail than these mastered DVDs. Which I think they can because less information would be masked by compressionand sharpening artifacts.

That's like taking obsure local analogy 1 and comparing it to obscure local analogy 2. get it?

It would still be a valid test at HD resolution if it was an upconverted SD. Anyone know where to find such a thing, or more detail about the true quality of upconverted SD?

I'm back on the fence with regard to HD-DVD as I just don't need it yet and the catalogs in the format war are bothersome, but if it really is going to make my existing SD collection look noticeably better on my 46" DLP then I may be down.

dunno about you guys, but to me it just looks like they altered the colors, and that's it, I don't see more details or anything, it's like they just played with contrast and sharpness for both pictures, and to make it even better, they didn't even captured the SAME frame for most of them..

You're not looking at it right then. Or something. :confused:

Yes, they are a couple frames off on most of them but it's pretty easy to see the difference in clarity.

I'm sure LOTR will look kickass on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. That said, those SD captures are not indicative of how it looks on my syste. It's still very much watchable, even with the HD "revelation" behind me.

Yeah, LOTR looks great here too... which is one reason I'm hesitant to get an HD player just yet. :)

I have HDTV cable which of course makes normal TV look like garbage. But while HDTV is noticably better than non-HD, SD DVDs are by no means hard to watch on my screen, even after getting used to HDTV.