P.S. For a definition of catch lights, check out wikipedia.com and look at the sample picture at the top right:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catchlight

On my HD TV the difference is so obvious it’s amazing. I show people that come over and they go “wow!”.

If you want a REALLY EASY test … just look at the eyes of the people on screen. The eyes are a dead give away. On DVD the eyes are somewhat lifeless. In HD the eyes suddenly come to life.

As a photographer I not only notice this, but I also know the reason why. As a photographer one of the things we do is position our lights so that we get a “catch light” into the eyes of the person. It’s this “catch light” which makes their eyes look alive. Without it, the eyes are dark and lifeless.

At lower resolutions you can’t see this catch light because it is so small. But HD finally makes the catch light visible because of how sharp it is.

Go ahead and look for the edges of anything else you see on screen. HD blows DVD away.

If you honestly don’t see it … you either need a better TV or a new eye doctor.

So I guess if you compare stills you get all this great difference. LOL.

IMHO “all” upscaled dvd looks like crap on my 62″ display. And I have tried all the video download gizmo’s and they “all” suck for audio/video quality versus a physical Blu-ray disc.

Toshiba, Sony bit the bullet when they lost the last format war (VHS vs Beta), so stop crying and stop trying to fragment the market and go Blu! And everybody had to buy new media when dvd displaced tape, so that argument from you folks above is wonk. Stay on dvd (like others stayed on vhs) while the market passes you by.

Now if someone would upscale DVDs to any sort of HD format (I’ll settle for 720p) on the YPbPr component outputs, then I’m interested. Oh, but the MPAA won’t allow manufacturers to do that. Since I was an early HD adopter, one of my old but perfectly good HDTVs has no HDMI, so that TV is stuck with YPbPr for its lifetime. HDMI is for suckers — consumers are being sold on the so-called quality improvement over analog connections, when the real purpose of HDMI is simply copy protection. If you have a 1080p display, you have no choice but to use HDMI. But if you have that display and you want to watch 1080p source material, you have no choice to buy Blu-ray.

If you want to extend the life of your DVD collection, just buy a cheap upscaling DVD player and you’ll get 95%+ of the benefits of this new Toshiba unit. If you want true HD from packaged media, you have to go Blu-ray and annoying HDMI. On the other hand, if you don’t need to “collect” movies and just want to watch once, nothing beats online delivery. As someone else said, physical discs are so old school. Before Blu-ray even has a chance to get off the ground, lots of people are asking “why do I even need an optical disc to watch HDTV?” And the answer is they don’t.

It comes down to which scaler is better – the player or the tv? The tv will pass-through a 720/1080 signal – If the player is better at it, then your image is better that way. A better tv scaler will negate the benefit of an upconverting player.

Let’s say we have a 1080p LCD TV. The display consists of 1920×1080 pixels. Now let’s take a 480p, which has a resolution of 720×480 pixels. If we could display the image on our TV without any upconversion at all, it would appear as a small box in the middle of our TV, which physically occupies 720×480 out of the the 1920×1080 pixels. Of course, you don’t see this happen on any HDTV because the TV itself has a processor that performs upconversion. To see a concrete example of upconversion, just look at any youtube video. At 320×240, the youtube video is just fraction of your computer monitor’s resolution – and you can see that it physically occupies a small area. Click on the maximize button though, and it takes up the entire screen – however, this upconversion obviously didn’t give any increase in detail. There is simply no substitute for a true high resolution source.

Why stop here…. why don’t they make it combo-unit with Upconverting DVD and Upconverting VHS I suppose if they can take a source material with 480 lines of resolution encoded on it, and present it in 1080 lines, they can certainly take a VHS with 240 lines of resolution, and do the same right ???

I find that most movies look just fine scaled up to 1080P and the cost for a HD version would not be worth it. Most movies are recorded with a high aperture so the focus is soft in the background (”the film effect”). These movies benefit the least in HD. But movies that are filmed in HD or have sharp focus of the background will look much better in HD.

I would prefer to have the movie in HD but I will not pay more for HD in most cases.

I agree if the street price is $150, I would pass.

1) Audio…. Blu-ray is worth the improvement in audio alone.

2) Upconversion is adding detail THAT ISN’T THERE…. it’s just “coloring” inside the lines if you will. I have 2 Blu-ray players, an HD DVD player, and a dedicated DVD player, because I don’t like the way upconverted DVDs look. YOU CAN NOT upconvert source material that is 480p in any resolution other than “enhanced 480p” it doesn’t become 1080i/p no matter how much you want to believe it…. it’s artificial “filler” that’s added.

3)The Blu-ray players play standard Def. DVDs….. so why do you think buying an upconverting player is better since you “don’t have to replace your DVDs” that doesn’t make sense to me!

I’m in no way some fanatical lunatic here to tell you it’s Blu-ray or nothing…. but if you want the best, and are willing to pay for it, Blu-ray is tops. If you’re content with DVD quality (which is fine for most) just get a $30 DVD player, and be happy… why spend $50, let-alone $150 for an upconverting player?

i rate upconverted dvd’s played on either my upconvert dvd player or ps3 a 7 outta 10.

bluray on the ps3 10 outta 10.

so .. i do see the use for the upconverion players. definately breathes life into dvd’s.

but i will certainly plug the PS3 as an AWESOME media center. Music, video (divx, avi, mpg), pictures all played from the PS3 or thru the home network. If you wanna go BluRay, the PS3 is a beautiful thing. For bluray and various other downloadable video media, PS3 is the only way to go.

If you wanna save some $$$, yeah .. a nice 720p display and upconverting DVD player is pretty nice.
But you definitely have to give the visual and audio nod clearly to bluray.

Noiro

If anyone is going to spend this much money you’re almost to a Blu-Ray player… If not then there are plenty of $79 DVD players that will upscale just fine.

Point here is that it’s too expensive for a simply upscaling player when most upscaling 1080p players are indistinguishable from this one.