samsung bd-p1000 upscaling question

[paulfromtulsa]

i was wondering what does the samsung blu ray player upscale regular dvd's to. 480p to what?

[BTBuck1]

up to 1080p

[paulfromtulsa]

i dont understand you say it up converts it to a 1080p but its not clear as a 1080p movie? so how does that make sense? so when it up overts what does it mean or do?

[ProvenFlipper]

If you take a picture that is 720x480 and stretch it to make it 1920x1080, all of the pixels are there, but each pixel from the original picture is copied over six times to make the new picture. This is alot different than having a picture that had 1920x1080 before stretching it.

[Blue]

A quick explanation is upscaling is basically guess work filling in the missing bits of the picture. Although they are getting good at it, upscaling is no where near as good as having the complete picture from the start. For more exact explanation do search on this forum, there are numerous threads on this subject.

[shido]

Originally Posted by paulfromtulsa

i dont understand you say it up converts it to a 1080p but its not clear as a 1080p movie? so how does that make sense? so when it up overts what does it mean or do?

Try getting a picture that was originally the size of a stamp and blow it up to poster size. Not a very good sight. Same with video. The detail that was lost in the DVD transfer isn't going to magically appear because you're displaying it in 1080p.

[paulfromtulsa]

good explanation guys. one quick question. so when a regular 480p dvd is played in a bluray player that upscales the signal to 1080p is the picture going to be significantly clearer than if it was played in a regular dvd player? the reason im asking is becasue of the stamp analogy about stretching the picture? i thought that it would be clearer if youdont strectch the picture and leae it at 480p . thanks for the help

[blueav3]

No matter what, if you have an HDTV, the picture is being upconverted to the resolution of the screen. You should try letting the Blu-ray player do the upconvert, or try letting your TV play the original 480p signal. Whichever does the better job, it really depends on the quality of your TV.

[Deciazulado]

First, the picture on many DVDs is optimized for 480i, not 480p, so it's a little bit softer than it could be.

No, the picture of a 480 DVD output is not as good as the same output optimally upscaled into 720p or 1080p picture. If you have an editing program, take a screen capture of a DVD at 480 (or use any 480 pixel tall picture) and upscale it using nearest neighbor upscaling to 1080. Now do the same using bilinear or even better bicubic upscaling. Now take the bicubic upscaled picture and sharpen it a little if you want it to look sharper (you decide how much). Now look at the nearest neighbor upscale and the sharpened bicubic upscale side by side. Thats the 480 DVD player vs the upscaled 1080 DVD output. The reason the regular 480 DVD output don't look that bad on your TV is because you probably watch it enough far away that it starts to look good at that distance/size. Also the 480 display might soften the image at bit making it smoother.

Now as to why this:

Originally Posted by paulfromtulsa

I thought that it would be clearer if you don't stretch the picture

Well that comes from that being true: if you watch the original image "unstretched" in its original size, the pixels then are sharper. That's why if you watch TRUE 1080 x 1920 content , since the image is larger, and the pixels sharp, it looks so good and contrasty. The 480 x 720 image unstretched is as sharp. But the image is small: a 480 x 720 image inside a 47" diagonal 16:9 1080 x 1920 LCD would look like a small 10" x 15" monitor inside the 16:9 23" x 41" panel.


Now if you do the upscaling with advanced algorithms and the re-sharpening, images can be enlarged, and even look better than the small untampered image (seems contradictory) if BOTH are seen at the same enlarged size (the nearest neighbor vs bicubic comparison) because you remove the pixilation of the smaller, original size. That's why upscaling looks good.