Posted by Bryan Heit on 10/23/06 17:47

George wrote:
> Just saw a 32 inch Westinghouse LCD TV, advertised on cableTV, with a
> built-in DVD player. They claimed that since it used patented bit for
> bit transfer from DVD to TV that they obtained 25% better resolution
> than stand alone DVD player.
>
> Anyone know the true story? No guesses or conjectures please. George
>

As Bill already mentioned, DVD is recorded at 480 lines of resolution.
It is not possible to improve this resolution, any claims otherwise are
simply false. Long and short - there is no way to recover "missing"
resolution, as it simply is not encoded on the disk. I doubt the
quality of this picture is any better then what you'd get from any other
up-converting DVD player connected properly to a hi-def TV.

What this player likely does (which is what all "up-converting" DVD
payers do) it try to improve the *apparent* quality of the image by
using fancy mathematical formulas to increase the size of the image.
Basically, the DVD player is making a "guess" as to what the picture
would look like had it been recorded at a higher resolution, and then
outputs that "guess" in 720p format.

At the end of the day, the picture from an "up-converting" DVD player
may appear to be of better quality then a picture from a standard DVD
player, but in reality the resolution of the pictures is the same (or
potentially even lower) compared to the original DVD.

Bryan

[Back to original message]