Upscaling DVD Players vs Upscaling HDTVs

Upscaling DVD players have become very popular with consumers that own HDTVs. However, the fact is that HDTVs have built-in scalers as well. This fact often gives way to comments that upscaling DVD players aren't needed, because HDTVs will upscale all incoming signals to their native display resolution anyway.

In response, you have to keep in mind that the scalers built into most HDTVs are very basic and often times do not have advanced processing to eliminate scaling artifacts, such as jagged edges, motion noise, mosquito noise, moire patterns, and proper detection of various video and film frame rate cadences.

All things considered, chances are, that an upscaling DVD player will have better video upscaling capability than a typical HDTV. To determine how good the scaler is in a specific DVD player or HDTV, Silicon Optix (now IDT) has developed an objective test on DVD that is worth checking out.

Of course, another way to check the difference between the quality of the scaler in an upscaling DVD player and the scaler in an HDTV is to set the DVD player to standard interlaced (480i) or progressive scan (480p) and see how it looks on your HDTV. Then, set your upscaling DVD player to 720p or 1080i and see, again, how it looks on your HDTV. If the former looks better, then the HDTV has a better scaler than the DVD player. If the latter looks better, then the DVD player has the better scaler.