I have the Sharp LC-37SH20U (http://www.sharpusa.com/products/ModelLanding/0,1058,1661,00.html) LCD TV

If I bought a DVD recorder, would my TV upconvert DVDs or do I need to buy a DVD recorder that upconverts? Is there a way to know?

I have the Sharp LC-37SH20U (http://www.sharpusa.com/products/ModelLanding/0,1058,1661,00.html) LCD TV

If I bought a DVD recorder, would my TV upconvert DVDs or do I need to buy a DVD recorder that upconverts? Is there a way to know?
All tv's will convert any signal to its native signal. If your TV is 720p and you send it a 480i signal it will convert it to 720p. How good a job it does is another question.

Okay, so how can I tell if it's "good" ad upconverting? When I play DVDs, they don't look as good as HD TV, which is expected, but they look good.

I'm just trying to decide should I buy a DVD recorder that upconverts or save the money and get a regular one.

Okay, so how can I tell if it's "good" ad upconverting? When I play DVDs, they don't look as good as HD TV, which is expected, but they look good.

I'm just trying to decide should I buy a DVD recorder that upconverts or save the money and get a regular one.
You're going to need to buy a test DVD, like Digital Video Essentials.

I have the Sharp LC-37SH20U (http://www.sharpusa.com/products/ModelLanding/0,1058,1661,00.html) LCD TV

If I bought a DVD recorder, would my TV upconvert DVDs or do I need to buy a DVD recorder that upconverts? Is there a way to know?

I am not familiar with your TV, you might want to search for it on the display forum, and see if there are any comments about the quality of its upconverting.

But, in general, upconverting in a DVD player is just a sales gimmick, since ALL HD TVs have to upconvert. Your TV cost way more than any DVD player you are likely to buy, so which do you think would be likely to have the better upconversion circuitry? Most likely the TV.

That said, most of the better DVD players will upconvert these days, so you might want to buy an upconverting player to get a better quality player. However, unless your TV does a lousy job of upconversion, given the choice of two identical DVD players, except one upconverts and costs more, buy the cheaper one.

There is a theory that an upconverting DVD player can do a better job than an upconverting TV set since the DVD player has access to the original digital image, can do the entire upconversion in the digital domain, and then send the result to the TV as a digital signal via HDMI. Whether this translates in practice to a visibly better result is another question, and a subjective one at that, which you can probably only answer for yourself by comparing the two side by side. In any event I wouldn't expect the difference to be very significant.

Thanks so much for the answers. Somehow I thought that quality would clearly be visible if the DVD player unconverted. It seems the cost of up converting DVD recorders are significantly higher than those who don't. The decision making is a bit easier since the difference may not be huge. :)

Sean & kjbawc,

I know the TV's will upconvert anything fed in through the analog inputs, but I am not clear about the HDMI input. Will the TV upconvert a digital signal coming in through the HDMI or does it expect the signal to come in matching the native resolution. Every upconverting player I've seen recently does so only through the HDMI out and I can't recall seeing any with an HDMI out that does not upconvert. Do either of you know more?

My undestanding of HDMI is that it can carry SD or HD. So a TV that has, for example, a native resolution of 1280 x 720 should be able to upconvert an HDMI signal that carries a 640 x 480 or 704 x 480 SD picture. If it couldn't to this, you'd end up with a small image in the middle of the display.

This seems to me like the way it ought to work, but I haven't any actual experience with it...