by canofhumdingers » Thu Oct 11, 2007 1:46 am
Glow-nut, you bring up an interesting point. however, I've read a post on avsforum.com where someone talks about personal experience with that same issue. He had a nice upconverting dvd player & wasn't impressed b/c he couldn't see much difference between it & the regular dvd player it had replaced. However, when he got an HD dvd player, he was amazed at how much it improved the PQ of standard dvds. He claimed that the upconversion done by the HD dvd player actually made a big difference in the quality of standard dvds even compared to a nice upconverting sd player.
Now, i take all this with a grain of salt b/c i'm not even convinced upconverting players are worth it (on fixed pixel displays such as plasma & LCD that is) as you're assuming the player has a better video processor than your tv. But if you have a really nice tv, you should already have a really nice video scaler built in. So, if you have a Vizio or something, an upconverting player might be worth it. But if you have a Panasonic, Samsung, pr something, you might not need it. But there's so many people on either side of the upconverting issue, & both sides have good arguments, that i still can't decide whether it's worth getting a new player just to see if it looks better. (the cheapo player i have looks great already, imo)
As for HD vs Bluray, i'm a wait & see kind of guy. hi def content is definately awesome (& worth a small premium for now i'd say, but not too much), but i'm not interested in having a nice expensive paper weight. I'll see who wins (please let there be a winner!). I'm not really partial to one over the other either as they both have pros & cons.