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True Blu Ray Vs Upscaler
lawrenma2
06-11-2008
Hi,

After borrowing a PS3 to check out Blu Ray quality for my new 46" 1080p LCD, I decided I really want a Blu Ray player, and quite fancy this Sony BDP-S350 as can't justify the extra for a PS3 and this looks better IMO.

My question is that although this advertises you will get 1080p output via standard DVD upscaling, why would you pay extra for a Blu Ray disc?

Thanks in advance!
technoflare
06-11-2008
a DVD upscaler will take a video file of 720x576 pixels (UK) and add pixels to make it 1920x1080 pixels. these added pixels are a good calcuation of what detail needs to be there to fill in the gaps but not perfect. A Bluray is mastered in 1920x1080p so has more detail. Also a DVD is about 8MB/s where as a Bluray is around 20MB/s or more to can be less lossy.

The simple fact is that a good upscale can come close to Blu-ray and wll look a lot better than Freeview SD or Sky SD buy there is a difference. Personally if its a film I really like and with lots of action or beautiful landscapes etc then I will get the Bluray, but is by no means worth replacing your DVD collection nor buying average films.
MAW
06-11-2008
I think the OP will see a night and day difference between upscaling and Blu ray on a 1080p 46" set, and a really scary difference with sky+. Don't get the blu ray unless you are also prepared to get skyHD. Having said that, I don't replace my general DVD collection with HD discs, except the few films that really benefit and are worth it as movies. I have a good sound system too, so that benefit might not be picture, I might do it for the audio.
simon69c
06-11-2008
Because upscaled DVD still isn't anywhere near as good as Blu-ray in terms of picture quality - it simply can't add detail that wasn't there before.

Upscaling essentially is just intelligently expanding the information from DVD so that it maps more clearly onto the higher pixel count on an HD screen. Even if you don't have an upscaling DVD player your TV will do the upscaling itself if it gets fed a picture that has a lower resolution than its display - so chances are you have already seen "upscaled DVD" anyway, so if you saw a big improvement when checking out Blu-ray then you have already seen the difference.

Admittedly some upscalers are better than others, but they still won't have anywhere near the level of detail of Blu-ray, which has 10 times the amount of information for any given series of frames compared to DVD (taking into account the difference between progressive and interlaced). Blu-ray also uses far superior compression techniques and so you will have less noise and artefacts in what is there compared with DVD too.

Oh and that's before you start to consider the audio benefits of Blu-ray too, though you really need a decent surround sound amp to begin to fully appreciate that as most people probably still only have a Dolby Digital / dts type surround sound (if that) and not an HDMI-audio capable amp that supports multichannel PCM and/or high def audio formats like Dolby TrueHD and dts Master Audio, though even Dolby Digital and dts will tend to sound a bit better on Blu-ray as they usually have slightly higher bitrates than found on DVD.
lawrenma2
06-11-2008
Thank you, guys - That definitely clears it up!
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