Which 4K player does the best job upscaling DVDs?

[mdhaus]

I'm curious which 4k player tends to do the best job upscaling DVDs to where the video is decent and watchable. Thanks!

[Jodi]

Originally Posted by mdhaus

I'm curious which 4k player tends to do the best job upscaling DVDs to where the video is decent and watchable. Thanks!

I have both Panasonic UB9000 P1K and Reavon X110. Both are awesome DVD upscalers. I also have a Magnetar UDP800 on standby, but I'm sure that both Mags are awesome DVD upscalers as well.

[Telemachus]

None of them from my experience, I feed 480i to my OLED

[sherlockjr]

The Panasonic 420, 820, and 9000 probably do the best job in upscaling because they have the HCX video processor.

However, they may not look much better or very different than what your TV will do for upscaling. Or any other 4K player. 4K has 16 times more pixels than DVD--that means that whatever is doing the upscaling has to create 15 pixels for every one that's actually present on the DVD. There's really no good way to do that very well, especially on the fly on consumer priced video equipment. The DVD simply has only 1/16th of the information that's on a 4K disk, so there's only so much that a device can do to make up the missing pixels. It's going to look fuzzy, etc as it tries to do that.

[hemlis1357]

I have the Panasonic ub9000 and I feel that the Sony x800 actually outperforms it with DVDs

[CWCprime]

I plug a DVD player with component-out into a RetroTINK-5X which can upscale to 1080p. I also throw on a CRT mask which helps hide some of the artifacting inherent to DVD compression and also gives it that nostalgic tube TV look. However, I already had the RetroTINK for my retro game consoles -- I'm not sure I'd dish out the $300 just for upscaling DVDs in this way if you didn't already own one.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by sherlockjr

The Panasonic 420, 820, and 9000 probably do the best job in upscaling because they have the HCX video processor.

However, they may not look much better or very different than what your TV will do for upscaling. Or any other 4K player. 4K has 16 times more pixels than DVD--that means that whatever is doing the upscaling has to create 15 pixels for every one that's actually present on the DVD. There's really no good way to do that very well, especially on the fly on consumer priced video equipment. The DVD simply has only 1/16th of the information that's on a 4K disk, so there's only so much that a device can do to make up the missing pixels. It's going to look fuzzy, etc as it tries to do that.

I think the Uniphier/HCX Pannys are piss poor at DVD upscaling, they create more aliasing and ringing than my OPPO or Sony. Examples here https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...0#post17146410 and here https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...y#post19700707. They also have a separate bug when playing SD content stored on an HD disc: https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...5#post14660725

[sherlockjr]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

I think the Uniphier/HCX Pannys are piss poor at DVD upscaling, they create more aliasing and ringing than my OPPO or Sony. Examples here https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...0#post17146410 and here https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...y#post19700707. They also have a separate bug when playing SD content stored on an HD disc: https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...5#post14660725

I won't argue--I notice little difference between my older Sony ES1100/X800M2 and my new Panny 820. They both look pretty lousy to me, but I rarely watch DVDs.

I prefer the upscaling from the 820 for BDs over what I saw from the Sony. But I've never tried a serious side-by-side comparison.

[mdhaus]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

I think the Uniphier/HCX Pannys are piss poor at DVD upscaling, they create more aliasing and ringing than my OPPO or Sony. Examples here https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...0#post17146410 and here https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...y#post19700707. They also have a separate bug when playing SD content stored on an HD disc: https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...5#post14660725

Which Sony model do you think does the best job with DVDs?

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by sherlockjr

I won't argue--I notice little difference between my older Sony ES1100/X800M2 and my new Panny 820. They both look pretty lousy to me, but I rarely watch DVDs.

I prefer the upscaling from the 820 for BDs over what I saw from the Sony. But I've never tried a serious side-by-side comparison.

The Sonys add noise reduction to sub-4K discs by default unless the output is set to Direct in the options menu during playback. (It's not in the main menu.)

[jurid]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

I think the Uniphier/HCX Pannys are piss poor at DVD upscaling, they create more aliasing and ringing than my OPPO or Sony. Examples here https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...0#post17146410 and here https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...y#post19700707. They also have a separate bug when playing SD content stored on an HD disc: https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...5#post14660725

It all depends on the source. Most movies are saved at 24p on the disc. Most shows and music videos [and DVD menus!] are 60i. Panny is bad with 60i, but great with 24p. Thus, if you watch mostly movies - Panny will be great (but not DVD menus!).

Many players like Sony can show in info bar if the source is 24p or 60i. You can see it with some software also: for example, you can strip MPEG of a movie off its flags and save it as 24p stream without recompression(!), and you will get a normally playing 24p stream (almost all of the time that is. That means it's 24p sourced.

[PAL is a different game though, I am talking about NTSC here]

[danny24]

You know the Panasonic 4K players by some here get a bad rep for DVD upscaling. I have used 4K players from Oppo, Pioneer, Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, LG and with DVD's and upscaling how good they look also has to do with the source material. There are DVD's that just look bad no matter what 4K player you use. I have the Desperado superbit DVD and on all the 4K players I have used it looks pretty much the same. If a DVD's bitrate is not good as they say you can't polish a turd.

[jurid]

Originally Posted by danny24

You know the Panasonic 4K players by some here get a bad rep for DVD upscaling. I have used 4K players from Oppo, Pioneer, Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, LG and with DVD's and upscaling how good they look also has to do with the source material. There are DVD's that just look bad no matter what 4K player you use. I have the Desperado superbit DVD and on all the 4K players I have used it looks pretty much the same. If a DVD's bitrate is not good as they say you can't polish a turd.

There are two issues here:
[1] is Panny good for DVDs? It is good for movies
[2] what is the best player to play DVDs? I have quite a few players [too many I think], I figured that the best playback for movies (but not for 60i-sourced material!) I get is from Toshiba XA2 in 1080/24p mode, then upscale on TV to 4K. For DVDs in general [including 60i sourced ones] I use for the sake of simplicity either Oppos all the way (like 103d), or a Sony BD player (not 4k) like 7200, 6700, or UHP-H1, again, put them in 1080/24p mode, and then upscale on TV to 4k. Sonies will output 60i-sourced material as 1080/60p, and 24p-sourced material as 1080/24p. Letting them output as 4k is not great. For some reason, Sony 4k BD players produce worse results.

Discussing whether DVD as a format is the best is irrelevant here

[Telemachus]

Geoff is right about the Panny, I watch a ton of TV shows on DVD still, and they all look horrible on the Panny, I tried them when I first got the 820 cause I was excited and quickly realized none of them looked right. The Sony x700 defintiely looks better, but my Toshiba XA2 looks better than all of them. I have not tried to watch any Hollywood films on the 820 yet to see if its any better if the source was film.

Originally Posted by jurid

Many players like Sony can show in info bar if the source is 24p or 60i.

Dang that's helpful. I have two tests to tell on my Toshiba HD-XA2 setup, one is just using Real Cinema and if it looks janky it's not 24p. The other is I can output my player as 480p on Auto (film/video) and if I get sloppy deinterlacing fields it's definitely not progressive source. I normally output 480i for this reason because LG has really good deinterlacing on their new sets.

[danny24]

It's funny you guys mentioned the Toshiba XA2 because I have that and the DVD upscaling looks the best on it. Have it in my home theater room. The Oppo BDP-83 also does an amazing job upscaling DVD's. However the user in this thread asked for 4K players and I wanted to point out that the performance is pretty much near or the same. If they want better DVD upscaling than get a Toshiba XA2 or Oppo BDP-83.

When I said you can't polish a turd I was not slamming DVD as a format. It's a great format. However some DVD's have such a low bit rate that no matter what player you use for upscaling you can't make it look any better.

[jurid]

Originally Posted by danny24

When I said you can't polish a turd I was not slamming DVD as a format. It's a great format. However some DVD's have such a low bit rate that no matter what player you use for upscaling you can't make it look any better.

I have seen some shows on Netflix at slightly above 1Mbs or even below (!) They all looked great. Of course, it's AV1. Bitrate is not the problem here. The MPEG-2 codec is.

[Ettore]

I can choose between Magnetar 800 (which I consider the best existing player), Reavon, Pannde 670, Sony 1100 and 800.
To read DVDs (I have thousands and thousands of them, from the oldest to the newest ones), I prefer to use Pannde: truly excellent upscaling and a good possibility to intervene on brightness and contrast. And to think that I never use it for blu rays due to the poor stability of the software.
Ettore

[blackray4k]

I have a 55" Sony X9500H and Panasonic UB420 & UB820. I get the players to output 4K to the TV.

When I first tried some DVD's, I expected them to look like utter crap on a native 4K display. But they looked far better than I ever expected them to. However, it all depends on the source quality. For example, Curb Your Enthusiasm looks significantly worse than Millennium.