Are upscaled DVDs considered HD?

[Jsheth]

I have a 50" Plasma, PS3 slim, and just got an HDMI

When I pop in a DVD is it on 1080p or 720p?

Is it HD or SD?

Can someone explain more about upscaling?

thnx!

[syncguy]

Originally Posted by Jsheth

I have a 50" Plasma, PS3 slim, and just got an HDMI

When I pop in a DVD is it on 1080p or 720p?

Is it HD or SD?

Can someone explain more about upscaling?

thnx!

Up scaled DVD is definitely NOT HD. It is upscaled SD. DVD has 720x480 interlaced resolution. blu-ray has 1920x1080 progressive resolution. blu-ray has at least 6 times information/data in comparison to DVD. No technology could create new information/data out of thin-air to increase DVD resolution to match blu-ray-HD. DVD will be always significantly inferior to blu-ray.

PS3 could upscale 720x480 DVD to 1080p. In this process PS3 interpolates (or create) new data points based on 720x480 pixel grid to fill the gaps of 19120x1080 pixel grid. It does a reasonable job and it is in most cases better than the TV set upscaling from 480p to 1080p. However upscaled DVDs are far inferior to 1080p blu-ray (provided the original blu-ray material is good quality and the transfer is good).

It is time for you to start collecting blu-rays...

[Jsheth]

Thanks for the info!

If only they would start releasing DBZ episodes on Blu
I would be one happy camper

[Dsella]

Yeah I was wondering how they looked, will probably watch a movie tonight then.

Thanks for the info sync.

[syncguy]

Originally Posted by Dsella

Yeah I was wondering how they looked, will probably watch a movie tonight then.

Thanks for the info sync.

Welcome. Not all blu-ray movies are in best picture quality. A few I could list as best pq (amongst many) are:
Pirates, Spiderman 3, iRobot. If you have the DVD, you may rent one of those on blu just for comparison. Set your PS3 to 24Hz output. You should see 1080/24p displayed on your TV if all set right.

Your seating distance should be about 2 to 2.5 screen "heights" to fully appreciate 1080P HD. So, for a 50" set, it is about 5'.

[U4K61]

Originally Posted by Jsheth

When I pop in a DVD is it on 1080p or 720p?
Is it HD or SD?

480p DVD is SD regardless of what what you do to the image later on. I have an old post: The Upscale Crisis. Follow the links.

[Batman1980]

Simply put, upscale cannot make something better than it is, only appear to be. 480p is 480p, period. All the upscaler is doing is guessing what should be there, which is very hit and miss.

[Uniquely]

Originally Posted by syncguy

It is upscaled SD. DVD has 720x480 interlaced resolution.

Actually it's 720X480 progressive.

[syncguy]

Originally Posted by robinandtami

Actually it's 720X480 progressive.

As I understand DVD is a natively interlaced technology. DVD native format is 480/60i not progressive. However, when a movie is stored on a DVD, 480/24p resolution can be (theoretically) extracted (from 480/60i) based on an inverse-telecine and deinterlacing process. In practice, a reconstructed 480/24p picture is at the mercy of the individual implementations.

[Anthony P]

Originally Posted by Jsheth

When I pop in a DVD is it on 1080p or 720p?

Is it HD or SD?

Can someone explain more about upscaling?

thnx!

each digital display (plasma, LCoS, LCD, DLP) will have a native resolution it could be around 1080p or 720p. that means how many pixels (individual picture elements) can be represented. That does not change no matter what you feed the display or what is on the disk. If you have a 1080x1920 that is the pixels it has, on the other hand if your TV is 768x1366, then that is what it has (and if it is 768 then if you feed it 720p it will upscale it a bit and if it is 1080p it will down scale it.

Now a DVD does not have HD content on it, it also has pixels but many fewer of them that is why it is not high definition, (i.e. the definition -detail- is not high) what happens is that if you have a TV with 1080x1920 (or 768x1366)resolution, it needs to take those bigger blocks that are on the DVD and subdevide them so that it matches the TV. Thgi is known as upscaling. Now the information is not there (for example you have a big block that is red) and they don't tend to match exactly so the upscaler tries to guess what some of these pixels should be (i.e. looks like there is a slanted line of red and blue, maybe it was supposed to be a line, so I will make it less jaggy and make some of the new pixels that represent red as blue and some of the new pixels that could be blue as red so that the line is smother). Now usually on the TV the algorithm will be less complex then in a good up scaling player, but it can't add detail that was never there in the first place (for example, maybe the BD will show that between the blue and the red there was a much thinner black line, the upscaler has no way of guessing that). Now if your TV is 768x1366 (which is why I brought it up since most 720p TVs are not true 720p) then if you feed it 720p then your TV will need to scale and if it was a DVD or 1080p BD then you are double scaling.