upconverters/Upscaler

[ctjoe]

Ok, i read that sd channels dont look as good on HD plasmas. Will and upconverter help this. Is one better and can one be picked up at a reasonable price. I see them from $200 and up.Unfortunately I spent my load on Tv and equiptment. Also what is difference between upconverter and upscaler? Thanks for all your help, I am lost, but if you need plumbing advice, I am there

 

[jonnythan]

My HD cable box upconverts all signals to 720p. They don't look that bad to me. Not nearly as good as, say, a 30" 4:3 SD Sony CRT, of course, but it's perfectly watchable. Looks as good as any other fixed-pixel display (DLP, LCD, etc).

480i and composite input look pretty horrible for some reason, but that's my particular TV (a Maxent plasma).

 

[HiJon89]

Ok, i read that sd channels dont look as good on HD plasmas. Will and upconverter help this. Is one better and can one be picked up at a reasonable price. I see them from $200 and up.Unfortunately I spent my load on Tv and equiptment. Also what is difference between upconverter and upscaler? Thanks for all your help, I am lost, but if you need plumbing advice, I am there

Displays such as plasmas can only display one resolution, so everything must be converted to their native resolution before it is displayed. Every plasma display has a built-in video scaler to convert everything to the native resolution. It is in this conversion process that the picture quality can be deteriorated. Rather than have the display's built-in scaler handle the video, many people prefer to have the video scaled to the native resolution before it even reaches the display. Most HD cable boxes have the ability to output all video at a fixed resolution (720p, 1080p, etc.) and also upconverting DVD players can be purchased which output at these resolutions as well. However, even the upconverters in these devices can offer less-than-optimal picture quality. Some people who are very concerned about picture quality will splurge on a video processor, which uses very high quality deinterlacing and upscaling technologies to ensure that the picture is converted properly. These processors pretty much start at $400 and go up to well over $10,000 and I would only recommend them to someone who has a very high-end display and source to begin with, or someone who is using a very large screen (100"+) where these small improvements in picture quality will be more noticeable.

 

[Jedi2016]

You have to consider the old adage of "crap in, crap out".

Consider that when you say "SD Channels" you're talking about broadcasts from cable or over-the-air or whatever. The reason some of them look bad on HD displays is because of the source.. the network is quite simply sending out a crappy signal. The resolution isn't really the issue, it's the actual quality of the source. And no amount of upconverting is going to make it better.

I've been under the impression from various talks that upconverters are worthless. The TV itself has to upconvert the signal anyway just to display it, so why spend extra money on an external device to do it? My TV does a fantastic job of it. Hell, I don't even have my DVD player set to Progressive, I just let the TV do everything, and it does it amazingly well.