Will an HD DVD player enchance the picture quality of regular DVDs?

One Response to “Will an HD DVD player enchance the picture quality of regular DVDs?”

1. mike1084 says:

   October 30, 2009 at 7:13 pm

   Short answer yes. The introduction of Blu-ray and HD-DVD has confused the issue regarding the difference between the upscaling of standard DVD and the true high definition capability of Blu-ray and HD-DVD. A standard DVD player, without upscaling, can output video resolution at 720×480 (480i).
   Upscaling is a process that mathematically matches the pixel count of the output of the DVD signal to the physical pixel count on an HDTV, which is typically 1280×720 (720p) or 1920×1080 (1080i – and, some cases, 1080p).

   To get the full impact of true high definition viewing from a disc format, you need to have either a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player connected to an HDTV via an HDMI connection and be viewing actual Blu-ray or HD-DVD disc content.

   Another point is that all HDTVs do have their own internal scalers as well. This fact often gives way to comments that upscaling DVD players aren’t needed, because an HDTV will upscale all incoming signals to its native display resolution anyway.

   In response, you have to keep in mind that the scalers built into most HDTVs are very basic and often times do not have advanced processing to eliminate scaling artifacts, such as jagged edges, motion adaptive noise reduction, and noise. All things considered, chances are that an upscaling DVD player will have better video upscaling capability than a typical HDTV. (The best upconverting DVD player on the market today is made by OPPO, utilizing Faroudja video processing technology), will make those old SD movies look like they were made in HD.