Video Asylum

Posted by Joe Murphy Jr (A) on April 30, 2006 at 20:53:09

In Reply to: DVD Recommendations? posted by DawgByte on April 30, 2006 at 14:56:34:

There always seems to be something better, just around the corner as a matter of fact.
:-)

Would you like High Definition going to your plasma? You might want to wait for a few months and check out the Blu-ray players that will be released. For regular DVDs, all will offer upscaling of SD content to 1080i, 720p and even 1080p in some cases. Let your own eyes pick the resolution that looks best with your display.

Oppo has the 971 out right now. It's an upscaling SD player with a DVI output (480p and up digital RGB) and that may fill the bill for you. Sometime in May, Oppo will be releasing an HDMI player -- the 970. It won't have Faroudja deinterlacing/scaling, but an alternative deinterlacer/scaler (can't remember which one at the moment). One thing that it will be able to do is output 480i YCbCr (basically what comes off the MPEG decoder), instead of just 480p and up, via HDMI. Your plasma would then deinterlace and scale the image to its native resolution or you can feed this signal to a dedicated video processor (that's the real reason Oppo is releasing this player) to feed your display a killer DVD image.

Samsung and LG are crap, but need to continue being big Korean companies with lots of money to throw around. Why? The competition helps to keep the better Japanese companies (re: quality oriented) on their toes and pushes them to engineer their products to higher standards.