Qubit

I have noticed that when I play R2 PAL discs, and there are diagonal lines across the image in the screen, these are not shown as straight lines, but they are sort of “jagged”. I guess the formal term for this artifact would be “aliasing”. And when I play the same title, but the R1 NTSC version, it looks fantastic, and the diagonal lines look much, much better.

I repeated this experiment with a few titles that I have in both formats (Prince of Darkness, The Hitcher, Zulu, They Live, The Eagle has Landed, and a few more) and I observe the same problem in all of them. So it seems that the problem is not with the DVD itself but with my setup. I have a multiregion Denon 2910 DVD player with an in-built 16 MB PAL to NTSC converter, and a 60-inch Sony SXRD. I am using the HDMI connections, letting the DVD player up-convert the signal to 720p or 1080i. Before, I had a humble 32-inch TV and these artifacts were not noticeable.

So my two questions are: (1) is there a way to get around this aliasing problem? (2) Does this reflect a problem with the PAL to NTSC conversion in the DVD player? 3) Or is it a problem with the up-conversion to an HDTV format from a Pal DVD? 4) When the DVD up-converts to 1080i or 720p, is the NTSC/PAL distinction still important? I would think that there is no 720p PAL or 720p NTSC, right?, it is just 720p. 5) Would this problem be corrected if I use instead an S-Video connection instead of the HDMI?

Thanks in advance for any information,

Marco