Quote:
“Perhaps you would care to give some examples of broadcast scaling which look any different than SD? - I've never seen any, the upscaled SD on the HD channels looks slightly better than the SD channels, but I would suggest that's because it's using four times the bandwidth, not because of any broadcast upscaling.”
At last, something we agree on!
The fact that the signal has been through all the processes necessary to broadcast it means that it will look cr@p (IMO) - UNLESS you then do something to it to improve/recover it from all the processes it underwent - which Sky boxes don't do. Whether the source material was SD or HD, it all suffers from the processes it undergoes to be broadcast, so I agree - yes it looks cr@p! But not necessarily because of the conversion from SD to HD, rather because it has then been mucked around in order to be broadcast.
Give me an SD DVD player giving out 576i (so NOT upscaling), into one of our boxes and out to a 1080p native display vs HD-DVD (or Blu-Ray) at 1080p straight in to the display and you won't tell the difference.
Ar$e about with the signal even more in order to broadcast it and it will always appear different (worse?) to the direct one. As I said above, even HD, when broadcast, is compromised because of the constraints placed upon it by the transmission medium (but this is by no means unrecoverable).
To summarise my ramblings, any "improvement" SD might have by being scaled to HD before broadcast is undone by all the processing done to the signal to be able to broadcast it. What you really need to compare is the upscaled SD BEFORE it then gets mucked about for broadcasting. It's like washing your car, & polishing it then throwing a bucket of mud on it! You just undid all the good work.
Didn't the OP ask about upscaling DVD's - not broadcast stuff
LCDMAN...............Lied about leaving this thread alone!