Do those DVD upconverters really work on HD TV's at improving the picture quality?

[Rob J in WNY]

When "reconstituting" a standard-definition 480 pixel movie frame to 1080 pixels (upconversion), the pixel "jaggies" are reduced in a process called "anti-aliasing." This simply means that the higher resolution naturally "fills in" the jaggies, reducing the appearance of the jaggies. Some upconversion algorithms perform better than others at this (such as in attempting to render increased visual detail), but all Blu-ray players currently available will upconvert DVDs to 1080 (1080p over HDMI).