HD200 & DVD Playback - Does It Upconvert?

[Savage1701]

I was playing a DVD of "Up!" for my son last night and noticed that the picture quality was incredible. Now, maybe that's just the result of Disney/Pixar doing everything they can to squeeze every bit of quality out of a standard DVD.

It never really occurred to me, since we use Sage 99% of the time for recorded TV, but does the HD200 attempt upsampling?

Our HDTV is slightly older - A Sony XBR LCOS set that accepts 1080i HDMI from the HD200 - but this DVD looked virutally like a Blu Ray.

Does the HD200 attempt any "higher end"-type upsampling? It's never really occurred to me to ask what sort of chipset is in this unit, since most of the focus seems to be with people, including me, modding or tracking down an interface or software or network issue.

Thanks for any info.

[Taddeusz]

If the HD200 did no "upscaling" you'd get a small video frame in the middle of the screen with a whole bunch of black around it. It depends on what you consider "upscaling". I don't know whether the HD200 does any sort of interpolation on the video before it gets displayed. In my experience I don't believe it does.

I suspect that if you put both the DVD and BD versions of "Up" side-by-side you'd be able to tell an immediate difference. Your suggestion that they'd look similar with the DVD version "upscaled" is dubious at best.

And I use "upscaled" in quotes because in common usage it is a marketing term that doesn't really indicate any sort of technical capability. Because in simplest terms scaling a 720x480 video to 1920x1080 without any sort of interpolation is still technically upscaling.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Savage1701

Does the HD200 attempt any "higher end"-type upsampling?

I don't think so. AFAIK it just does a basic/standard resample. There's nothing wrong with that, with a good source you really don't want to do much more than that anyway. "High end" type upsampling usually involves trying to harden edges and sometimes reduce noise, both of which are somewhat hard to do well.

[Savage1701]

Tadd: Fair enough point. Obviously, any term I use is going to be somewhat slang in nature. I understand your point - it would be a tiny window.

Stanger: Good point also. I would agree, and that was why I was going to be kind of surprised if it did indeed do that.

Thanks for the replies. The quality of the DVD just really struck me. It is gorgeous and smooth. No judder, no jaggies, nothing.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Savage1701

Stanger: Good point also. I would agree, and that was why I was going to be kind of surprised if it did indeed do that.

Thanks for the replies. The quality of the DVD just really struck me. It is gorgeous and smooth. No judder, no jaggies, nothing.

With good DVDs it's really not too hard to do well. Jaggies usually come from bad deinterlacing, which isn't an issue for good DVDs.

What I've found with the HD200 is that it has quite competent scaling, if nothing special, but the deinterlacing appears to be flag based, so DVDs or other content with bad flags is not handled gracefully.

And as for the scaling, I've found more "high end" solutions (eg those in the Pioneer 51FD BD player or the Planar 8150's video processor) to offer better scaling. Specifically edges better retain their "hardness" without ringing or other issues usually associated with excess sharpening.

[TwistedMelon]

There's no such thing as "standard" upsampling. You might describe some scaling as "basic" and that's something that won't employ any calculations to smooth out the image. Nearest Neighbor for example. You simply get larger blocks representing single pixels.

I'm fairly sure that's not what the HD200 does. The System on a Chip running the HD200 likely supports at least a few scaling algorithms, but I'd have to check the specs to find out which ones. It's not unthinkable to expect that it's currently doing at least a bilinear scale.

If you want to minimize the amount of scaling performed by the HD200 you would turn on the Native Resolution option which will ideally pick the closest resolution to the video format. At that point your TV or external processor would handle any further upscaling or picture enhancement.

[stanger89]

Well yeah, that's what I mean, why I said resample and not just scaling. A basic resample is like a bicubic or the like.

What I mean is that the HD200 just does that which is by today's standards, basic or standard, ie a simple resample. Better scalers and video processors use more advanced techniques, like Lumagen's "No ring scaling", sharpenning, noise reduction, etc.