Samsung DVD-HD950 HD Conversion DVD Player , Black
Progressive vs. Interlaced DVD Encoding
I tend to agree with most of what has been said about this DVD player.  It's pretty decent, although probably not as good as of a picture as some others out there (Panasonic, Oppo) in the same price category.  But then, can you really tell the difference and is it worth the extra money or loss of features?  That decision is really for you to make.  Different things are important for different people. <br /> <br />The DVD-HD950 does give you a lot of features for the price.  The most highly rated upscaling player in terms of picture quality (Oppo) does not have the EZ-View feature (I *really* like this feature because my LCD TV does not do perfect blacks.  Blacks bars on 2.39:1 movies are OK, but grey-ish black bars stink).  The Panasonic S97S does have the equivalent of EZ-View, but is notably more expensive and does not come with cables (making it even more expensive in the end).  The DVD-HD950 is a higher-end version of the DVD-HD850 in that it does DVD-Audio and SACD and comes with HDMI/DVI cables. <br /> <br />Your mileage as far as the upscaling/deinterlacing quality will vary depending on how well you TV does this.  Some TVs come do with better technology than most upscaling DVD players, so you should try the player in all modes and see which one looks the best.  Furthermore, keep in mind that which mode looks the best may also depend on the movie itself and how it was encoded. <br /> <br />Speaking of encoding, I *have* to chime in here regarding the confusion of progressive vs. interlaced in the actual DVD encoding.  In short: \\"Aleksey\\" and \\"Count\\" basically are both right! <br /> <br />The long answer: All DVDs for the North America market store \\"fields\\" with 240 lines each.  There is no way in the MPEG-2 scheme used by DVD players that you can store a single image of 480 *consecutive* lines.  HOWEVER, film sources only have a new frame every 1/24th second.  This means that it takes less time for your DVD player to read an odd/even pair of 240-line interaced fields (it does this every 1/30th of a second) than it does for the film frame to change.  DVDs made from a film source take advantage of this fact and store a single \\"progressive\\" 480-line film frame as two interlaced 240-line fields.  The DVDs have a special flag that tells the DVD player not to use the normal de-interlacing scheme it would use for standard NTSC 480i video.  Instead, when it sees this flag your DVD player reads an odd/even pair of interlaced fields, and then weaves them together to construct a single perfectly progressive movie frame. <br /> <br />The hard part about deinterlacing a standard NTSC 480i stream is that the image actually changes between each 240-line field.  For example, if I am watching a tennis ball fly across the screen on my local TV broadcast, then the position of that ball actually changes every 1/60th second.  The odd and even interlaced fields are not part of the exact same image.  This means that the deinterlacing technology has to try and compensate for this.  This is a very difficult task and is the reason deinterlacing technology is such a big deal.  This is in contrast to a film source, where your DVD player performs almost no work at all to reconstruct a perfect progressive image. <br /> <br />For more on this topic, I suggest reading sections 1.40 and 3.8 of the \\"Jim Taylor's Official DVD FAQ\\" availible online.