ADS Technologies HDUP1500 HDTV Upconverter
Lots of potential, but scaling performance so-so
I recently purchased ADS's HDTV Upconverter for use with my Mitsubishi 42&quot; HDTV (CRT-based rear projection).  I have a variety of video sources including an HDTV receiver, a DirecTV/Tivo receiver, a progressive scan DVD player, and an Xbox game console.  Broadly speaking, I wanted to improve the quality of standard definition 480i signals from the Tivo and reformat 780p signals from the Xbox to work on my Mits which only accepts 1080i (along with 480i/480p).  I also tried upscaling the output from my DVD player, sending both interlaced and progressive scan signals to the scaler.<br />The HDUP1500 certainly does provide a wide range of flexibility, in that it can take virtually any video signal and deinterlace/scale it to all of the current standard and high-definition formats.  I was successfully able to input all my sources and output the signals at 1080i (also tried 480p to see the deinterlacing capability on 480i signals).  Unfortunately, I was less than impressed with the results of the unit's deinterlacing and scaling.  Scaling of 480i signals from the Tivo was decent if the sequences were mostly static images.  Xbox 780p signals were indeed converted (Soul Caliber II) but with excessive edge enhancement, imo.  I preferred the progressive scan output of my DVD player to the video sent thru the scaler.<br />PROS:  supports virtually all formats in &amp; out, ability to scale to various resolutions (for fixed pixel displays) and usual high-def formats (780p/1080i), does pretty well on static images<BR>CONS:  motion sequences end up w/ fair amount of artifacts, excessive edge enhancement degrades picture, no pass-thru of 1080i signals (these get pillar boxed, unfortunately), switching between inputs takes several seconds, mediocre 3:2 pulldown processing (mix of video &amp; film sequences)<br />Overall, it's difficult for me to justify the ~$600 price for mediocre scaling and deinterlacing.  I ended up returning the unit as I'd rather save the money and applyit towards the purchase of a newer TV which has better built-in scaling and deinterlacing capabilities (e.g. Samsung DLPs or others).  The ADS Tech HDUP1500 may be better suited for people with plasmas and other fixed pixel displays.  DVDO and others are expected to release other high-def scaling products in the near future, which may be another option though these are all likely to be substantially more expensive.