Blu-ray versus HD-DVD? How about neither?

[admin]

Malcolm said he recently went to a show where a company showed him a scaled DVD movie playing side by side with an HD-DVD machine. They were holding a contest on two 1080p 50-inch TVs to see who could identify the image and the right player. Malcolm said about half of the people were guessing wrong. That’s because the DVD image was scaled up by the Realta HQV image processing chip from Silicon Optix. That chip makes a huge difference in quality, Malcolm said.

http://www.mercextra.com/blogs/takahashi/2007/08/16/blu-ray-versus-hd-dvd-how-about-neither/

I've done similar visual tests on my old upscaling DVD player, and it's actually quite difficult to tell any differences during playback. When paused, you could see the difference, but only if you look into the details (upscaled DVD has lots of "fake" details, oversharpening noise - the HD DVD has the real details). This is only on my 720p screen, and 1080p might make some more difference, but probably not too much. Comparing un-upscaled DVD to Blu-ray/HD DVD shows a much bigger difference ... like the difference between VCD and DVD.

[drfsupercenter]

I'm still using 27" CRT... I'm not gonna get HD or Blu-Ray until I have no choice...

[Chewy]

Comparing un-upscaled DVD to Blu-ray/HD DVD shows a much bigger difference ... like the difference between VCD and DVD.

It's hard to imagine that much difference since vcd seemed roughly equivalent to vhs when I compared them.

[admin]

On a largish HD panel that doesn't have a built in dedicated HD scaler, yes, the difference is quite huge, as is the difference between SDTV and HDTV (even when our HDTV is plagued by artifacts due to lower than required bandwidth).

I've made an example based on high res photos, that will give an indication of what I mean. Of course, the actual upscaled DVD image is a lot better than what I have made on this page (basically used the sharpen filter, but from a distance, it does look better than the unsharpened "DVD" image, but it's a good estimation of what you can expect from DVD, upscaled DVD and proper HD):

http://www.tppblog.com/upscale.html (warning: large image files on page)