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Consumers Don't Have to Choose Between Blu-Ray and HD...

 
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MYoung




Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 369
Location: Madison, WI


PostLink    Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 8:38 pm    Post subject: Consumers Don't Have to Choose Between Blu-Ray and HD... Reply with quote


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...with Universal Players.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/innovation/article/consumers-dont-choose-bluray-hd-universal-players_457709_57.html

Let's see, buy a Blu-ray player for $350 or PS3 for $400 and a HD DVD player for $100-$150 for a total of $450 to $550 which will come with tons of promo titles (do the combo players come with promos of each format?!) or spend $800 on a combo player which likely does a mediocre job of playing each format and isn't upgradable to Blu-ray Profile 2.0? Way to be completely clueless, Fox News! Oh, but it gets better!

Quote:
But for those consumer who don’t have the nearly $1,000 to spend on a universal DVD player, there’s another way to get true HD out of existing DVDs, thanks to consumer electronics company Oppo Digital.

Oppo makes “up converting” DVD players that transform your existing DVD library into high definition. Jason Liao, vice president of product development at Oppo, said it’s “up converting” DVD players’ quality rivals both Blu-Ray and HD. The DVD players sell for between $169 and $229.


True HD?!?! What a load! Okay, so I can by an Oppo upconverting DVD player for more than the cost of a discounted HD DVD player which will already do a great job of upscaling DVD? Awesome!

Better yet, upscaled DVDs rival Blu-ray and HD DVD in quality? That's pretty amazing technology -- being able to increase the detail of the image by 600% completely out of thin air! It reminds me of all the silly Hollywood movies where they are doing video surveillance and the guy in charge tells the computer geek "Enhance!" and after a few clicks on the keyboard the pixelated image of the bad guy becomes crystal clear. Talk about deception! Now I'm rooting for Toshiba's HD DVD player price reductions to hurt Oppo's sales!

The media are so clueless!


Last edited by MYoung on Wed Jan 30, 2008 8:47 pm; edited 1 time in total
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greg_mitch




Joined: 03 May 2006
Posts: 5321



PostLink    Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 8:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Enhance! {type keystrokes} Enhance! {type keystrokes} Enhance! {type keystrokes}

Ah, it is so clear now!
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paw




Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 1176
Location: Arvada, CO


PostLink    Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 9:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Too bad there's not a way to comment on the article. However, you can rate it. I recommend 1 star (Horrible!). I guess we could email the editor but I don't feel like wasting my time.
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MYoung




Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 369
Location: Madison, WI


PostLink    Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 9:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I sent them feedback...

Quote:
The article "Consumers Don't Have to Choose Between Blu-Ray and HD with Universal Players" is out of date and inaccurate. Upscaling DVD players don't improve DVD image quality a single bit! They merely resize the image for HDTVs. It's like taking a picture with a low-end digital camera and blowing it up to poster size. You cannot pull image details out of thin air! Blu-ray and HD DVD have SIX TIMES the detail of DVD! Period. End of story.

http://www.curtpalme.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8899

You guys really should have your writers do better research and find unbiased sources. Vice president of product development at Oppo? Completely biased. I know such notions of journalism may strike you as foreign, but next time give it a try! You all might catch on to this whole journalism thing after all with enough effort and hard work!


I like Fox News too! They put lots of eye candy in front of the camera! 8)
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drice1234




Joined: 07 Oct 2006
Posts: 1309
Location: Allen, Texas


PostLink    Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 9:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
Upscaling DVD players don't improve DVD image quality a single bit!


I am curious if this statement is true. I was under the impression that there was some sort of picture enhancement taking place. It seems that the 1080i output on my upconverting DVD player gives a much, much better picture than the SD output.
Dan
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MYoung




Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 369
Location: Madison, WI


PostLink    Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 10:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

drice1234 wrote:
Quote:
Upscaling DVD players don't improve DVD image quality a single bit!


I am curious if this statement is true.


Dan,

It's impossible to improve on the source resolution's detail. Upscaling is RESIZING! It's not up-detailing. Film-based NTSC DVD is 480p after IVTC. If you upscale 480p to 1080p, while the resolution is now 1080p, the picture detail is still that of 480p. In fact, it's technically worse than 480p because the resampling (upscaling) process will introduce some level of blurring. Sure, you can sharpen the image, but you aren't gaining any detail by doing so.

Picture a 640x480 pixel checkerboard alternating black and white. If you do a "bicubic" upscale (considered one of the best upscaling algorithms, though it's somewhat subjective with respect to the source material) of that image to 1080p what do you think you'll get? Will you A) get a 1440x1080 checkerboard with each pixel alternating black and white; or will you B) get a somewhat blurry (some gray pixels between the black and white pixels) 640x480 checkerboard that's occupying 1440x1080 pixels? If you said B you are correct. If you do a "nearest neighbor" upscale you won't get gray pixels, but you will get squares and rectangles of differing sizes. There aren't supposed to be rectangles in a checkerboard! You would get a perfect checkerboard when upscaling with nearest neighbor if upscaling to a whole number times 640x480 (say 2x, 3x, 4x, etc), though if you performed such an upscale on a photo the photo would appear pixelated (blocky). The resulting gray pixels in the case of bicubic resampling the checkerboard, and the squares and rectangles in the case of nearest neighbor resampling the checkerboard is called "aliasing". Also, if you sharpen the bicubic upscale then your checkerboard will have curved edges!

There is no free lunch. Garbage in, garbage out.


Last edited by MYoung on Wed Jan 30, 2008 11:18 pm; edited 4 times in total
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ecrabb
Forum Moderator



Joined: 13 Mar 2006
Posts: 15909
Location: Utah

TV/Projector: JVC RS40, Epson 5010


PostLink    Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 11:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yep. Mike's right on - upscaling DVD players don't improve image quality. NTSC SD DVD's are 720x480, and nothing is ever going to make them any more than that. There's only one situation that a store-bought upscaling DVD player will improve your picture quality, and that's if the scaler in the DVD player is better than the one in your display - which may or may not be true.

Even if there is some sort of 'enhancement' taking place, it may or may not be an improvement. One of the more common 'enhancements' that cheaper players do is sharpening, which when used vary sparingly can improve apparent resolution. Unfortunately, it's usually overdone (especially in cheaper players) and the result is ringing, which looks sharper to the untrained eye, but actually MASKS real source image detail.

It's almost criminal what these companies are saying about upscaling DVD players. There were two parts of that quote that pissed me off. The first was a stupid comment by the writer of the article: "Oppo makes “up converting” DVD players that transform your existing DVD library into high definition." That's completely ridiculous. It's not even good writing for a non-technical audience. It's simply false. Then, the quote by the Oppo hack: "its “up converting” DVD players’ quality rivals both Blu-Ray and HD." Moronically general at best, and intentionally misleading at worst.

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lyd




Joined: 15 Sep 2007
Posts: 390
Location: Lake Mills, Wi


PostLink    Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 11:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Doing my job, I get a pretty good line on the latest BS that the poor bastards who buy things at places like Best Buy and Circuit City are being fed. The sales-kids are really pushing these upscaling falsehoods hard in order to sell HD sets.

When it gets really interesting is when that pack of lies collides with the pack of lies they get told by the CATV sales-kids trying to get them to order an HD set-top box.

They wind up with two new pieces of hardware, neither of which is producing images that look as good as they were led to expect, and desperately want me to do something magic to make them feel better about the load of cash they just dumped into their new display. It's a sad thing.

lyd

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drice1234




Joined: 07 Oct 2006
Posts: 1309
Location: Allen, Texas


PostLink    Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 12:10 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

ecrabb wrote
Quote:
upscaling DVD players don't improve image quality.


ecrabb wrote
Quote:
As for scaling your DVDs, you might find that even a cheap Toshiba A3 (what, $100 at Walmart?) upscales your old DVD's as well or better than does the Centerstage


Are you saying that any piece of equipment that "upscales" is not enhancing the image but merely passing it through and making it fit into a certain format or are you referring specifically to upscaling DVD players? I am trying to understand that if I take an image with a certain amount of pixels and make that image larger without doing anything to it then the image should look much worse (pixelated). But with my NeoNue upconverting DVD player the image looks much better when I upscale to 1080i then when I play in SD.
Thanks
Dan
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garyfritz




Joined: 08 Apr 2006
Posts: 12024
Location: Fort Collins, CO


PostLink    Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 12:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Think what happens when you view, say, a 600x400 image from your digicam in IrfanView or similar viewer. But gee, that picture is so dinky on your screen. So you tell IrfanView to double it in size, stretching it to 1200x800. Now the picture is bigger -- it has more pixels in it. But you didn't add any more information. It's still the SAME 600x400 image you started with, just stretched to fill more pixels. If you took a new 1200x800 picture with your digicam, it would have MORE DETAIL than the 600x400 image stretched to 1200x800, right?

That's basically what the upscaling players do. They turn a 480-line image into a 720-line or 1080-line image. They're just "stretching" the 480-line image, just like IrfanView stretched your small picture. A true HD signal, from HD-DVD/BD/satellite/etc, has 1080 *real* lines of content. It has **more information** and more detail than the upscaled image, just like your second 1200x800 digicam picture had more detail than the stretched 600x400 image.

Does that help?
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lyd




Joined: 15 Sep 2007
Posts: 390
Location: Lake Mills, Wi


PostLink    Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 1:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

drice1234 wrote:
But with my NeoNue upconverting DVD player the image looks much better when I upscale to 1080i then when I play in SD.


So your DVD player does a better job of interpolating than your display device, is all that is. It isn't improving the image as such, it is just degrading it less. EDIT: (Or, you just prefer a softer image and/or scanlines closer together, if you are looking at the SD without scaling on one of your projectors. I definitely prefer SD scaled to 720p on mine.)

lyd

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Last edited by lyd on Thu Jan 31, 2008 1:16 am; edited 1 time in total
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kal
Forum Administrator



Joined: 06 Mar 2006
Posts: 17850
Location: Ottawa, Canada

TV/Projector: JVC DLA-NZ7


PostLink    Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 1:09 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

ecrabb wrote:
Yep. Mike's right on - upscaling DVD players don't improve image quality. NTSC SD DVD's are 720x480, and nothing is ever going to make them any more than that.

But what a sec... I see in Hollywood movies and TV shows all the time how they "zoom in" on a picture taken from an NTSC security camera and "enhance" the image so that it becomes clearer and clearer until you can make out licence places from 10,000 feet and what people are writing into notebooks from 1000 feet.

TV doesn't lie!

Wink

Kal

P.S. On a more serious note, I've seen threads in the past where people take a 1920x1080 original picture, down-rez it to 720x480 and then upscale it to 1920x1080 using photoshop. The two pictures are viewed side by side. Obviously not the same image anymore.

You can't get something from nothing. Absolutely impossible to fill in the missing blanks with any 'real' data.

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Person99




Joined: 09 Mar 2006
Posts: 4901
Location: Flower Mound, TX


PostLink    Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 2:15 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Has Fox news ever got anything right?
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MYoung




Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 369
Location: Madison, WI


PostLink    Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 2:53 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

drice1234 wrote:

Are you saying that any piece of equipment that "upscales" is not enhancing the image but merely passing it through and making it fit into a certain format...


Yes, precisely!

drice1234 wrote:

...or are you referring specifically to upscaling DVD players?


The promotion of upscaling DVD players is the main source for all this deception. Don't get me wrong, scaling is good, especially for us CRT projector owners as many of our displays cannot scale, unlike newer TV sets which typically do a good job of scaling all by themselves. I own a $1000 scaler for my Sony 1292Q. Granted, the scaler I have is more sophisticated in that it can take film-based 1080i @ 60Hz and output 1080p @ 48Hz to my 1292Q (48Hz eliminates frame judder). The point is that a scaler doesn't magically ad detail to the source image. The claim that upscaling players can upscale DVD making it "rival" HD is complete bull$#!t.

drice1234 wrote:

I am trying to understand that if I take an image with a certain amount of pixels and make that image larger without doing anything to it then the image should look much worse (pixelated).


No, it won't look much worse. The purpose of upscalers is to make the image look true to the source, which in the case of film-based NTSC DVD is 480p. Imagine a tiny ass CRT monitor that has a sweet spot resolution of 480p. In other words, when feeding it 480p the scan lines don't overlap and don't have gaps. In the CRT projector world, imagine a Sony 1031Q, which has a sweet spot around 480p. The goal of upscalers is to make that 480p image look just as good on a big ass display as it does on that tiny ass CRT monitor, or tiny ass (for a CRT projector) 1031Q, without introducing too much aliasing. Of course, in the case of the 1031Q, upscaled DVD will look a bit better on a 9" set with EM focus and better optics than on a older ES focusing 7" set. The CRT monitor is probably the better example. With discrete display devices such as LCD, DLP, and plasma, you can get excessive blurring or with really primitive systems you can get a blocky picture due to nearest neighbor upscaling. With CRTs you can get scan line gaps. The upscaling feature just resizes it to make it look as true to the source on the target display as possible.

drice1234 wrote:

But with my NeoNue upconverting DVD player the image looks much better when I upscale to 1080i then when I play in SD.


That's because 1080i is likely near a resolution (refresh rate and interlaced vs. progressive counts as well on CRTs) that suits your particular projector best. If your projector can truly resolve 1080i then you should notice a dramatic difference between DVD upscaled to 1080i and HD DVD, HDTV, or Blu-ray at 1080i.
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ecrabb
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PostLink    Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 3:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

drice1234 wrote:
I am trying to understand that if I take an image with a certain amount of pixels and make that image larger without doing anything to it then the image should look much worse (pixelated). But with my NeoNue upconverting DVD player the image looks much better when I upscale to 1080i then when I play in SD.

That's a little different. You're comparing apple and oranges. Nobody is saying there's no benefit to upconverting DVDs on CRT projectors - quite the contrary, actually. But, have you seen any CRT projectors at Best Buy lately? There aren't even any CRT-based RPTV's anymore as far as I know. It's all digital, and they all have internal scalers in them.

In the case of your CRT projector which has no built-in scaling and where a low resolution input signal results in large gaps and noticeable scan lines, then yes - the benefits of scaling are huge. But, that's scaling in general that you're benefitting from - not the scaling DVD player itself.

What we're talking about is the relatively worthlessness of up-converting DVD players in the context of current consumer displays. Take a whiz-bang new Sony XBR 52" 1080p LCD that some dude just pays $3500 for. The sales guy says, hey, you need one of these $200 whiz-bang "upconverting DVD players" to go with your new LCD to make your old DVDs look like HD. They guy says, "Oh wow, OK." The reality is that, in most case, the scaler in the display is probably as good or better than the scaler in the DVD player. That's what we're talking about here.

SC
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WanMan




Joined: 19 Mar 2006
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PostLink    Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 10:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just send the a$$clown an email mailto:feedback@foxbusiness.com

BTW, I also gave it one star, but that's because I couldn't give it no stars.

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MYoung




Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 369
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PostLink    Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 2:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

To the credit of upscaling DVD players, I know someone who has a 40-something inch Sony LCD HDTV that cannot be more than a few years old and it does a TERRIBLE job of upscaling DVD. She needs an upscaling DVD player not to make the DVDs rival HD, but rather to make the DVDs not look like crap. So much for paying a premium to get the Sony. She also had just SD CATV connected to it and lives only a few miles from several TV stations broadcasting in HD. Needless to say, the rabbit ears from her old TV were moved to the HDTV. 8)
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