I am repeating myself but I honestly don't see much value to have any video scaling processors on board receivers at all. If HK sticks with the stupid Faroudja because it costs them next to nothing, then I said they are just being smart. IMHO money saved by not having onboard video scaler can be better spent in improving other areas such as power supply, noise reduction, more HDMI and top quality video signal pass through etc. Most HD players and TV have decent scaling capabilities and if more people rely on the TV's build in scaler it will give their manufacturers incentive (competition) to improve on that quality, instead of putting REON/ABT etc. on receivers and HD players that often go to waste. I lost count on how many ABT/Reon and others in my system it is getting ridiculous.
Having the video processor within an AVR has many advantages...
A typical home theater system will have a wide variety of sources connected, each of these sources requires
different video post-processing modes.
The video processing modes may include:
a. NR
b. Edge correction
c. Film edit
d. Aspect ratio
e. Gamma gain
f. Sharpness
Connected sources could include a PS3, cable box and a digital camera.
If one expects the video post-processing to be done within the video display, then every time one switches to a different source they need to go back to the display's OSD and change modes...
As when the AVR is connected to the video display through HDMI, all modes within the display are applied globally to the single input from the AVR, a major disadvantage...
For example..
- On the cable box, one is watching a movie so he wants the film-edit mode ON.
- On the PS3 one is playing games so most of the post-processing modes should be OFF
- On the digital camera, one will likely want to adjust the sharpness and gamm gain controls
Perhaps in the future when
all sources are HD, there will be less need for changing video post-processing modes, however in today's SD and HD world these mode changes are
frequently required.
Regarding choice of video processors, this now comes down to the marketing game which is better..
Anchor Bay, Marvel, ST, TI, Reon..
Just like which audio DSP or DAC is better..
Just my $0.00..