Hello. I just bought a samsung 4053 lcd tv.

I tested out watching some dvds through my xbox 360 and a Panasonic s47 dvd player. I have them both hooked up with componenet cables and progressive scan enabled.

the 360 appears to have a much smoother picture. While the s47 does not have a bad picture it just doesn't look as good. I also tried switching back to 480i on the s47 and the picture looks a little different than 480p but not really enough to say its better or worse.

Is it possible the 360 is smoother because its leaving out more of the details?
I do know the hassle with using the controller and fan noise rules out the 360 as being my main dvd player.

I would be curious to know as well, I have a similar situation with my Panasonic S77 hooked to my Toshiba 44nhm84 DLP via hdmi to dvi cable. I know the Faroudja chip in the panny is likely the main cause of the macroblocking, but didn't realize how bad it was compared to the 360 when watching upconverted movies. There is no macroblocking when watching sd-dvd's on the 360 which is connected via VGA, but there is the odd (but very low) occurence of minor jaggies.

It's really annoying to me knowing my 360 does a better job than the panny! I even brought home a denon 1930 to try with wishful thinking that it might have a different implementation of the chip, but alas same problems unfortunately.

I even tried flipping between 480p component connection and 720p/1080i hdmi on the panny to see how it looks. No macroblocking on the component of course, but the picture in bright scenes not as good and sharp vs the upconverted picture.

Just thought I'd share my frustrations and some of the things I've tried. I think I will start using the xbox as the main player for now, fan noise isn't that bad but is worse when playing hd-dvd's with the addon.