On April 10, 2007 at 16:51, OTAHD said...
Upconversion usually makes the picture look worse
as the scalers in the DVD player are often worse than
the scaler in your TV.
If it's a no name cheap DVD player I would agree. Good DVD players can have excellent Up-Conversion. Don't know about Sony players he mentions, but Denon does a good job.
Unless you dish out hundreds or thousands of dollars for
an external scaler to match your TV's native resolution,
you're just best to output the disc's native resolution.
I disagree with this entirely... see below for why.
Even if you were to get a new player, I'd still reccomend
outputting 480i over component.
I'd recommend using the progressive setting on your DVD player, which will then do 480p. This will look great compared to 480i. Try any DVD player at a store hooked up to a TV, and go in and out of progressive mode while watching a movie. (The disc is by its very nature interlaced, so matching the TV to the DVD will not produce the optimum picture, as you'll get that in progressive mode.)
I have done tests on a display using HD and Blu-Ray players. Players putting out HD signals (720p, 1080i, 1080p) did not look different over short lengths of Component Video Cable, or HDMI cable. The set I used was not a production model, and did have good A/D Converters. Some cheaper sets might skimp there, and give better results using HDMI.
The real reason to use HDMI, is when viewing HD and Blu-Ray content. There's no problem with the movies being released presently, as the content protection is not been enabled on any disks to date. But when disks start being produced with the content protection enabled, the full resolution will not be available without using the HDMI connector.
For purposes of legacy DVD's, HDMI is not needed, and little if any difference will be discernable between HDMI or component video connections.
