Picture this: more pixels more problems.
Jeff Sauer
...Realta, now some two years old, put much of that expertise onto a chip that could be integrated into DVD players, standalone scalers, and displays themselves. Realta has been well-received by device makers and image-quality critics. However, it's a premium product compared to image-processing chips from companies like Pixelworks, Gennum, and Faroudja, and a higher cost has ultimately limited its broad appeal among consumer-oriented products.
Reon, on the other hand, is designed to compete more directly with the cost leaders, while still, according to Silicon Optix, delivering the Hollywood-quality video processing of Realta. Indeed, Reon boasts most of the same features, including four-field-per-pixel de-interlacing for maximum sharpness, film cadence processing, diagonal filters to help remove aliasing and stair-step artifacts from de-interlaced video sources, detail enhancement or sharpening to counter the softening of noise and digital artifacts, and color detection and correction, all using 4:4:4, 10-bit image processing. There's even the geometric-distortion processing of Silicon Optix's older Image AnyPlace engine.
The primary difference between Realta and Reon is the programmability of Realta that enables custom control for specific or high-quality applications or hardware. The lack of that programmability affords a smaller and less expensive chip that is ultimately more appropriate for general-purpose display products, without losing functionality that would probably not be used in consumer devices anyway...
