Samsung DVD-HD950 HD Conversion DVD Player , Black
No, Aleksey Sundeyev is wrong...
Please don't let the false comments by Aleksey Sundeyev discourage you from reading my review of the \\"up-scaling\\" technology.  It was a well thought out review that made very cursory mention of the fact (yes, the FACT) that no DVDs are encoded at 480p. <br /> <br />The guy wanting me to check my facts should check his facts.  There is no possible way that any commercial DVD of a movie, a TV show, or anything else is encoded at 480p.  It would not play on any DVD player manufactured today.  There is no 480p standard for DVDs.  You cannot even author one like that. <br /> <br />You can tell he doesn't have a clue because he talks about \\"interpolating\\" from 480p to 480i.  The term \\"interpolating\\" means \\"guessing by intelligent averaging\\".  If you were going from 480p to 480i, there would no guessing or averaging involved, it would be a \\"simple\\" matter of just separating the odd and even lines and sending them one frame after another.  Interpolating only comes into play when the ORIGINAL source of DVD material was interlaced and you are trying to de-interlace it.  You cannot just jam the odd and even lines together because you'll get \\"jaggies\\" (jagged edges) on any objects that were moving between the frames, so you have to interpolate the missing lines in each progressive frame to avoid the jaggies. <br /> <br />There could be several factors involved in the result you see that earlier CSI episodes are not as good as more recent ones, but I guarantee you that it has nothing to do with any DVDs encoded at 480p.  The most likely reason is that they started using hi-def cameras that don't interlace on-the-fly.  The end-product DVD is still interlaced, but the original video source was non-interlaced, and therefore progressive-scan DVD players have a much easier time of re-assembling the full frames because there was no time lapse between when the odd and even lines were recorded by the camera (no jaggies).  Another possibility is that the more recent episodes were encodedat a higher bitrate (less compression). <br /> <br />J Schey emphasizes my original point about the uselessness of these up-converting DVD players.  He says that he did not see any difference between 720p and 1080i out of this player and 480p out of his Denon.  I'm actually surprised that it was not worse. <br /> <br />If you look at the sales information on his TV, it says right there that regardless of what you send this TV, it will be up-scaled to 1080i.  So if the Samsung is up-converting to 720p and sending that to the TV, then the TV is up-converting to 1080i that's two up-scaling incidents.  This double up-scaling is what I was saying may actually give you worse results because the line interpolation is happening twice, and taking the average of an average is not a good idea. <br /> <br />Sending 1080i from the Samsung to this TV probably doesn't have the problem of double up-scaling, but my question then is \\"Why would you use a $150 DVD player to up-convert when you've got a multi-thousand dollar TV that most likely does a much better job of it?\\"