Upscaling DVD's.... why not Upscaling normal SD TV ?

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if DVD's can be upscaled, then why can't normal Standard Definition TV broadcasts be upscaled ? does such a machine exist ?
 
It probably wouldn't help much tbh and the TV is scaling it up anyways if you think about it.

expensive AV AMPs can scale anything to HD( £600+ range) so yes such a machine does exist

sid
 
Some of the top range TV's do upscale, Philips Pixel Plus technology is a prim example. Sony, Panasonic etc have there versions too.
 
Cheap way round is to simply use a PC based tv system and let that do the scaling.

ASE001 - all fixed resolutions TV's scale, how else do you think the panel is always filled perfectly no matter what you feed it? :p
 
Jaap74 said:
if DVD's can be upscaled, then why can't normal Standard Definition TV broadcasts be upscaled ? does such a machine exist ?
I wouldn't worry to much about upscalers...It a marketing hype...(unless your looking at the £1000 scalers)

Upscalers can only make PQ better if there scaler is better then the one built in to your TV....

If your TV has a crap scaler builtin then one would maybe worthwhile...
 
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chaparral said:
I wouldn't worry to much about upscalers...It a marketing hype...(unless your looking at the £1000 scalers)

Upscalers can only make PQ better if there scaler is better then the one built in to your TV....

If your TV has a crap scaler builtin then one would maybe worthwhile...


Just out if interest, isnt it possible that a crappy scaler inside a tv would actually interfere with the better signal being input? (I would guess every signal going through a selected input would have to go thru the internal scaler)

I dont know how scalers work so please excuse if this is a dumb question it just occured to me is all?
 
Jez,

What you stay is not strictly true, up scaled pictures to my knowledge add information to the picture. Most LCD’s stretch the picture to fit the screen and that’s why SD pictures can look blocky on large low cost LCD. Stretching a picture in basic terms is an analogue function, increasing the horizontal and vertical size as on a traditional CRT TV. An up scaled picture is normally handled as a digital image and through complex software algorithms pixels (picture information) are added to match the resolution of the display 1280x720 (720p) or 1920x1080 (1080i).
 
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ASE, since when have normal LCD TV's been able to change the number of pixles present in the panel.

If the LCD didn't upscale then you would have a 720x576 image in the middle of the LCD.
 
LCD’s don't work that way, they basically mimic an analogue CRT display and stretch the picture. It’s difficult to get your head around this, in simple terms all you are doing is replacing the glass tube in a CRT TV with a LCD panel and fancy electronics which makes the LCD panel work like a CRT tube (this applies to SD/DVD sources).

They don’t do pixel mapping unless you are using component or VGA or HDMI or DVI and some don’t even do that correctly (this applies to HD and PC sources).

I’m being very general here so don’t pick holes at the specifics please.
 
Actually I think its somewhere inbetween - a little like Phillips PixelPlus system not to mention most of the other manufacturers have a similar system

I was under the impression that with most sources (depending on the actual set will depend on which connections do this and which dont) on an LCD it sort of got the info of what two pixels should look like and did an "educated guess" at what the middle one looked like - obviously not as good as a proper scaler but better than just stretching the image over a bigger resolution

Please correct this if Im wrong but I always thought this was how most worked (obviously the cheaper LCD's dont even do this, and they literally just stretch the signal as much as possible to keep the right proportions)
 
FrankJH said:
Actually I think its somewhere inbetween - a little like Phillips PixelPlus system not to mention most of the other manufacturers have a similar system

I was under the impression that with most sources (depending on the actual set will depend on which connections do this and which dont) on an LCD it sort of got the info of what two pixels should look like and did an "educated guess" at what the middle one looked like - obviously not as good as a proper scaler but better than just stretching the image over a bigger resolution

Please correct this if Im wrong but I always thought this was how most worked (obviously the cheaper LCD's dont even do this, and they literally just stretch the signal as much as possible to keep the right proportions)

Indeed, where everything has gotten confused is simply that stretching and scaling is generally used in the same context. I took what ASE said to mean either.
 
If you would like to see stretching, you can do this on LCD screen that is connected to your computer via a VGA cable. If you use the LCD OSD (setup) menu (LCD TV’s can have this option hidden in the engineers menu). You can make the picture stretch, contract, move it horizontally and vertically. On the newer LCD monitors, they can adjusts all these automatically. From this experiment you can see that the picture is not mapped to pixels. Its the same on LCD TV's.
 
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