A Test by an Imaging Technician

[CptGreedle]

With the recent news and statements made by Toshiba, certain things have upset and enraged everyone at the Blu-ray community. Mainly I am talking about their claim that they can make a DVD upconverter that can give you an image equal to an "HD DVD" -or rather Blu-ray or HD- image. Well I decided to investigate this claim more fully than just not accepting the logic that an SD image just doesn't have the information to make an HD image.
So I decided to do a little research.
Unfortunately I am not able to copy or find the exact results of a DVD upscaler of the quality they talk about, since the technology simply is not out there yet. Sure there are upconverters, but none close to true HD quality. So I used the next best thing to experiment with upconverting an image by myself.
In the Digital Photography and Image Editing world, there are certain standards everyone uses. For high end professionals like myself (we are talking about "National Geographic Society" level here, I do work there), Photoshop is a must for image editing. However there IS a standard superior to Photoshop for Image Enlarging. This program is called "Genuine Fractals". Now this is mostly used to enlarge an image using a logarithm that is similar to a fractal to interpret the missing data. This is far more accurate than the standard "bicubic" resampling which merely copies pixels and blurs or sharpens edges. As far as I know, Bicubic is the only way upconverting DVD players work, but if someone has more information on this please share your knowledge so I can do a more extensive study. Genuine fractals is used mainly for prints, but can also be used for converting SD video to HD (they include a tutorial with the software), but it takes several hours for even a short video.
Either way, the important thing to note here is that Genuine Fractals takes approximately 5 seconds on a high end computer to process each image, while bicubic takes closer to 1.5 seconds. Either time is too long for a DVD/video which has to process anywhere from 24 pictures each second to 60!
Still, assuming that somehow Toshiba was capable of harnessing the processing power of a high end computer, perfecting the logarithms of fractals, and cutting down the required time to convert such images, the following would be the results and comparison to what you would see.

The first image is the actual data on an anamorphic DVD. On the internet it looks too tall and misshapen, which is due to the anamorphic nature of the pixels (this will show up ini Photoshop). The second image is what you will see on your SD TV from a DVD. The third image is the actual source, true HD at 1920x1080. The fourth image is the upconverted result using genuine fractals (industry standard) to make an "HD" image.

UPDATE: The fifth image is what a bicubic up-sampled image will look like. Again I am not sure the technique used for upconverting DVD players, but this is the best I can reproduce using high end digital imaging.







Pay special close attention to the details in the edges, the fine grain and the wood textures.

What do you all think? Can Toshiba make a true HD image from a DVD?

I didn't think so.

NOTE: To enlarge an SD image to a FULL HD 1080 image, you need to enlarge the picture ~267%. This does not include bandwidth, sound, motion, interlacing/progressive. WIth even a single image it is impossible to get close to true HD from SD no matter how advanced the technology you use.