I keep watching TNT and I can't belive how good their 1080i feed is..showing older movies not in HD format so they must upconvert. How and what equipment do they use to upconvert that makes their signal so good??? I want a DVD player that can upconvert just as good...

Many of the movies shown on TNT-HD are in high-definition.

The age of the movie has nothing to do with it. High-definition digital transfers are created from film stock with telecine systems. Film -- depending on the quality of the original stock -- can have far higher resolution than HD.

Whenever studios decide to release an older film on DVD, the first thing they do is create a high-definition 1080p24 digital master via telecine of the original film stock. This 10-bit 4:2:2 1920x1080p24 master is then re-encoded with MPEG-2 @ 8-bit 4:2:0 720x480 for DVD. Some vertical filtering may be applied to minimize flicker on older CRT SD displays.

For Blu-ray and HD-DVD, the 10-bit 4:2:2 1920x1080p24 master is re-encoded with MPEG-2, AVC, or VC-1 at 8-bit 4:2:0 1920x1080p24 for use on disk. The same thing is done for high-definition on channels like HBO, TNT, and Hdnet, but with MPEG-2 exclusively at 12Mbps to 18Mbps, depending on the channel. Some providers like Dish Network and DirecTV then degrade the picture further by downconverting the 12-18Mbps 1920x1080 feed to 8-11Mbps 1280x1080.

Thank for that reply...I wasn't aware that the acutal stock film had resolution better then HD..I thought the movies had to be shot with an HD camera in order for them to be shown or recorded in HD. And older movies were not shot with an HD camera so an upconversion had to be made....WOW...that is very intresting info....So I guess I'm going to have to wait till HD or Blue-ray players come down in price.....to enjoy..