So we have all sorts of devices that upscale std dvd's to HD-ish levels and we have Blu-ray disks of movies that were not originaly shot in HD...how do they compare?

Very few movies are/were shot in HD as you're thinking about it. However, they were shot on film, which translates to about 4k resolution (roughly 4x the resolution of today's HD displays). Any film that's mastered properly onto BD from the original film will look superior to a well-upscaled, well-mastered SD-DVD. It's simply because there is more information, leaving less/nothing to have to extrapolate and "fill in the gaps".

There are many factors, however. Quality of source material, quality of mastering, playback equipment, screen size, not to mention expectations, and more all figure in.

So we have all sorts of devices that upscale std dvd's to HD-ish levels and we have Blu-ray disks of movies that were not originaly shot in HD...how do they compare?

It all depends on the source material, display size, and viewing distance.

In my case, with a 1080p front projector, 9' screen, and 12' viewing distance, nothing upscaled looks close to HD. It is definitely viewable, but is a far cry from real HD. On my 65" flat panel, from 15', upscaled stuff looks pretty good.

In my view, upscaling just smooths out the picture. You can't add detail that is missing from the source.

Art

I think he's asking if 28 Days Later/Traffic/Escape from NY/(insert movie that has uses upscaled SD master) looks better upscaled by the encoder on the BD or upscaled by you on DVD.

If there is any edge-enhancement (even just a little) in the sd material, upscaling it to hd format then makes it *really* stand out.

I´ve seen some hardware products that imply upscaling video will be handled with fractal math. I don´t know how they do it. I´ll seek the webpage and post it later.

So we have all sorts of devices that upscale std dvd's to HD-ish levels and we have Blu-ray disks of movies that were not originaly shot in HD...how do they compare?

There are only a couple of BD movies that were shot in SD that I am aware of. Seeing as how I have these all on DVD already, there isn't really much of a benefit of going to an HD format for them except that BD could yield higher bandwidth for SD and less compression artifacts particularly if you're hitting the limits of MPEG2 on a DVD. But then you're stuck with whatever upscaling method they used to encode the BD.

This is a rather arcane question given only a few SD movies on BD, so if you're curious, then I suggest you explore it yourself, because I don't think many people are hugely concerned about this.

edit: I'm not clear if this is what you were asking.