Question about upconversion.

[Captain Rex Kramer]

A question about upconverting. Is it an automatic process within the player, or are there settings that must be messed with? I have a Panasonic DMP BD-35, and have read that it displays standard dvds beautifully. Personally, I think they look like crap. It's no different than a standard dvd player. Blu-rays look wonderful; standard, garbage. I looked in the manual, but it doesn't mention anything about upconverting. Any suggestions, or am I S.O.O.L?

[Clark Kent]

I do not have that player, but yes, there are usually settings to enable dvd upconversion.

[Afrobean]

I have a Panasonic DMP-BD30K and some discs look good others look TERRIBLE. No setting necessary to fiddle with.

It depends on the disc/movie in question. After all, that's the point of BD, right? If you could use a player to upconvert your DVDs and they looked amazing and perfect, what would be the point of purchasing the same film on BD?

And actually, upconversion is just the process of taking the 480i picture and changing it into a 1080p picture before sending it through the HDMI. It can't create information where there is none, so when it blows up the picture in resolution, it just looks at adjacent pixels and guesses what should be in the pixels that need to be filled to meet the 1920x1080 resolution.

[KubrickFan]

Originally Posted by Captain Rex Kramer

A question about upconverting. Is it an automatic process within the player, or are there settings that must be messed with? I have a Panasonic DMP BD-35, and have read that it displays standard dvds beautifully. Personally, I think they look like crap. It's no different than a standard dvd player. Blu-rays look wonderful; standard, garbage. I looked in the manual, but it doesn't mention anything about upconverting. Any suggestions, or am I S.O.O.L?

It's probably somewhere in the 'video options' on the player's menu. You can choose if it outputs everything in 1080p.
With my player (Sony BDP-S350) it really depends on the disc. The discs that already looked horrible look precisely that. Others, like the LOTR EEs, look pretty good, actually. Although that's probably because I don't have the Blu-Ray to compare it with.