Viewing SD on HD TV

[rone]

I picked up a nice 20" HD TV with HDMI, VGA, and composite inputs. In dual monitor mode the Solitaire only uses the composite outputs for the play back side. The resulting picture is far from nice. What is a cost effective method of getting the SD picture out of the cassie and into the HD TV? Some DVD players claim to upconvert to HD. Will they take the Cassie SD signal and upconvert in real time for playback or does the upconvert only work on SD DVD's?

The SD signal into a HDTV sure looks bad!

RonE

[LouBruno]

Purchase the ATLONA SCALER. S-Video to HDMI.

Plug in S-Video into the scaler from your Solitare and then connect the HDMI output to your HDMI monitor.


http://www.nextag.com/ATLONA-S-VIDEO-CO ... rices-html

[ASHampton]

SD has very poor resolution opposed to HD we all know that. The problem is that when viewing SD on your HDTV you will notice in some cases Halos on the edges of objects, mosquito noise (usually at the top of the screen) And very bad banding in the gradients as well as noticeable pixelation in the darker colors (blacks and blues). The upside to an HDTV is beautiful images in HD...the downside is that they can bring out the worst in SD video if not properly up-scaled.
My 2 cents.

[TimKennelly]

What Seth said.

Early HD sets were horrible at handling SD footage and it sounds like your model fits in with that group.

Thankfully, most units now are doing a better job of this.

As for the upscaling, yes if your Arabesk DVD is compatible with your upscaling DVD player (plays in it) it will be upscaled in "real time" playback.

How good a job this does depends on the player and the monitor as well as the video quality of the DVD.

IE: I would expect an Arabesk DVD authored at Normal will look better upscaled than one authored on Reduced and that one authored on High will look better than one authored on Normal, etc.

[rone]

I am not trying to use a DVD player to upscale a DVD from SD to HD. I have done that and it looks fairly nice.

I am using dual monitors on my Solitaire which does NOT have an HDMI output. I noticed SOME DVD players (not mine) has composite inputs and HDMI outputs. These players usually cost between $80 - $150.

The question is will these players take the Cassie input and send out the HDMI in real time? If I can spend $150 or less and get a real time upscaler AND a DVD player for less than a dedicated $350 upscaler....that might just be a good deal .

[ASHampton]

Its a craps shoot. To me its like the all in one printer, fax, copier and scanner. They do an ok job at everything but are not great at any one task in particular. I believe that you will always get better results with a unit that was designed to do one thing. This being said its still a craps shoot. You can always take the DVD player back to the store.

[TimKennelly]

I haven't noticed any players having inputs, although not ruling out some might.

Why would a DVD PLAYER have composite or any inputs?

[rone]

AH.....I went to Best Buy over the weekend and figured out MY MISTAKE.

I said a DVD PLAYER and what I should have said was a DVD RECORDER. Can anyone verify a DVD RECORDER will take a composite input and upconvert the signal to HDMI out. Not recording to DVD here...just upconverting signal to my monitor with HDMI input.