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

[Afrobean]

Originally Posted by BillieCassin

I guess I have a "low rent" TV, because when it gets a 480p image it just blows it up, whereas the upconverting DVD player redraws it into 1080p

This shows a misunderstanding of how technology works.

No matter what, a modern HDTV is going to process the image it receives to format it properly for the screen. Some TVs might be able to do 1:1 display of 1920x1080 pictures, but everything else is going to be processed, upscaled, de-interlaced when necessary, etc. There are different ways it can be processed, different scaling algorithms, different de-interlacing techniques, but nowhere in that line is there room to IMPROVE anything. The best upscaling process can do is minimize loss from the encoded source.

Watching it through an HDMI connection shows the quality that was there that they never saw before in the same exact DVDs.

This is an admission of me being right. It does it's best ot preserve "the quality that was there that they never saw before". It does not improve quality, it minimizes loss. It cannot create what's missing, but it can do it's best to ensure the bit that's there, the bit that's always been there, looks as good as is possible.

But all TVs upscale, process, and de-interlace anyway. Wanting to watch DVDs over HDMI isn't so bad, but wasting money on a standalone DVD player is.