The other thread about HD and FFDshow has me wondering at what point does HD start to look better then SD. Now do not jump in here and say always, think about it for a while. I would really like to explore what conditions determine our ability to see a better image. I'm going to list the things that I can think of, let me know what you know about the subject.

1) The HD source has to be better. HD is pretty new, so the industry has something new to learn and the cost is probably a big factor too. I would not expect everything in HD to be automatically better then SD.

2) Producing a watchable HD image may require it to be shot differently. Sure the image could be razor sharp with excellent colors, but it does not mean it will be as watchable as SD. A image that totally blows you away may end up being distracting. It would be like putting a super foxy women in a movie with tons of cleavage showing, she could be a really good actress, but who would care. You could just end up staring at how terrible the makeup looks or how the props are fake and thinking that Science fiction movie needs a bigger budget.

3) How much better will our players/processors get at faking a better looking image. These guys that are using advanced processing are seeing some pretty amazing results. Right now everyone on this forum is using some sort of processing to make a SD DVD look tons better. When will there be a user friendly player that can make SD look as good as HD?

4) The biggest factor in producing a HD image is the PJ. Which PJ's will show a noticeable difference between SD and HD materials.

5) Even if you have a PJ that can make HD look better then SD, can you set it up so it will?

6) Last, but what is probably not worked on a lot or can be changed is the theater itself. Viewing distance and screen size would make the biggest difference here. Take two theaters, one with a screen that is twice as big as the other, the viewing distances are the same. The guy with the larger screen might need to run HD just so when his buddy (who's running SD material) comes by he does not complain on how soft the image looks.

Some reasons I'm exploring this are, SD material is going to be around for a long time, you may never be able to get some stuff in HD and SD will probably always be cheaper:)

Deron.

The other thread about HD and FFDshow has me wondering at what point does HD start to look better then SD. Now do not jump in here and say always, think about it for a while. I would really like to explore what conditions determine our ability to see a better image. I'm going to list the things that I can think of, let me know what you know about the subject.

1) The HD source has to be better. HD is pretty new, so the industry has something new to learn and the cost is probably a big factor too. I would not expect everything in HD to be automatically better then SD.

2) Producing a watchable HD image may require it to be shot differently. Sure the image could be razor sharp with excellent colors, but it does not mean it will be as watchable as SD. A image that totally blows you away may end up being distracting. It would be like putting a super foxy women in a movie with tons of cleavage showing, she could be a really good actress, but who would care. You could just end up staring at how terrible the makeup looks or how the props are fake and thinking that Science fiction movie needs a bigger budget.

3) How much better will our players/processors get at faking a better looking image. These guys that are using advanced processing are seeing some pretty amazing results. Right now everyone on this forum is using some sort of processing to make a SD DVD look tons better. When will there be a user friendly player that can make SD look as good as HD?

4) The biggest factor in producing a HD image is the PJ. Which PJ's will show a noticeable difference between SD and HD materials.

5) Even if you have a PJ that can make HD look better then SD, can you set it up so it will?

6) Last, but what is probably not worked on a lot or can be changed is the theater itself. Viewing distance and screen size would make the biggest difference here. Take two theaters, one with a screen that is twice as big as the other, the viewing distances are the same. The guy with the larger screen might need to run HD just so when his buddy (who's running SD material) comes by he does not complain on how soft the image looks.

Some reasons I'm exploring this are, SD material is going to be around for a long time, you may never be able to get some stuff in HD and SD will probably always be cheaper:)

Deron.

This is just based from my eye's observation.

I always record local shows like Heroes, Moonlight, Chuck, etc via mythtv. It also records commercials. I have seen picture quality from some advertisements/commercials in 4:3(1.33:1) format that are phenomenal. It's possible that the vbr encoding done for those ads/commercials are very high or similar to the vbr they used when recording "hd". It's like a 1920x1080 cut on both sides so it looks 1436x1080.

You could just end up staring at how terrible the makeup looks or how the props are fake and thinking that Science fiction movie needs a bigger budget.The funny example of this is porn. Do you REALLY want to see that "actress's" zits (in various parts of her body...) in High Definition? ewww....

When will there be a user friendly player that can make SD look as good as HD?Won't happen. It can't, assuming the HD source is properly shot and presented. The HD source has more information in it that the SD source just doesn't have, and it can't just create it out of thin air. Imagine you took a picture of the front page of a newspaper. The HD image shows the whole page in razor-sharp detail so you can read every line. The SD image is fuzzy. You can read the headlines but the small type is just a mass of gray blur. There is NOTHING you can do to turn that gray blur into sharp type. The information just isn't there. You can play tricks to try to turn the blur into character shapes, which is basically what the "SD enhancing" technologies do, but you don't know what letters are there and there isn't enough information to guess.

4) The biggest factor in producing a HD image is the PJ. Which PJ's will show a noticeable difference between SD and HD materials.
5) Even if you have a PJ that can make HD look better then SD, can you set it up so it will?I think any decent 8" EM set will show a dramatic difference. If you have a decent setup with proper focus & convergence, you should be able to see plenty of additional detail at 720p or 1080i. I don't currently have HD (but that will change in a few days :)), but when I had Dish HD, the difference on my XG was dramatic. And that was just with my amateur setup skillz.

Gary

There is NOTHING you can do to turn that gray blur into sharp type.

Well, there is. It's called "super-resolution" (I did a PhD designing hardware for it). The blurring can be defined as a mathematical function applied to the original good source. If you find the inverse function, you can apply it to the blurred picture and add back detail. The problem is that this process amplifies the noise as well, and algorithms to counter this are incredibly processor hungry, so are difficult to do real-time.

With things like the PS3 Cell processor now available, it may be getting easier to do it.

But you're saying you have to find the inverse function to the ORIGINAL good source, right? Which means you have the information available. In a standard SD source you're not going to have the HD equivalent available (otherwise why bother showing the SD??). You don't have that additional information so you can't find the inverse function. Correct? Or are you saying you can find the inverse function for any arbitrary signal source without referring to the original high-resolution source!? That I'd have to see.

I figured somebody would call me on this. There are certainly things you can do to increase the apparent information content (resolution) of the image. But the ability is limited. If your picture of the newspaper is so out of focus that you can't even tell where the headlines are, then there is just no way you're going to reconstruct the fine print. At some level of blurriness it gets sharp enough that you CAN discern the characters and reconstruct the original text. I'd say the SD-to-HD conversion is somewhere in the middle.

I'd have to say even HD lite from my sats is better than upscaled SD DVD on my XA2 the majority if the time. Also SD has the problem of the edge enhancements, which the HD lite has none of, which again makes it nicer to watch.

It's ALWAYS better!!!

I sense you are sitting on the fence, waiting for the "format" war to be won and not willing to spend a few bucks to see what all the fuss is about.

For crying out loud!!!!!! You missed out on the Walmart special, but you can still get a Gen1 HD-DVD player for $100-150, and an HD-Fury, or Moome card for your PJ.

If you decide they aren't better then their resale value is right up there with their cost.

There have been LOTS of posts here and on the other site of guys that went ahead and tried it and NOBODY that I can remember ever said "Nah, no big deal". They all said "Wow, it IS better!!!".

If you don't want to start with an HD-DVD player fine - buy a BluRay player, but START!!!!

My 2 cents, along with a couple of beers to goad me along!!! :)

Edit: As far as the upscaling argument goes, my thoughts are this: Would you ever question "When is Stereo better than Mono?" You can take a mono signal and process the heck out of it, but will it ever be as good as a stereo recording? And surround sound is better than that.

GEBrown

They could end the format war, I could have someone give me a HD player, but I would still not be able to see any improvement. Almost everything I watch is not available to me in HD. 95% of my viewing is Concert DVD's. The other 5% is SD DVD's I pick up at yard sales for a buck or two. I'm what you call a yard sale adopter, I'm so far behind the times, by the time it gets to me, there is a new format out there:)

Gary

The ability is out there to enhance a image to far beyond what our PJ's are capable of. Sure, you are not going to take this dot (.) and turn it into Cameron Diaz, but you should be able to do quite a bit with what is on a good SD DVD. The problem is our computers are too slow and the software is not very user friendly. Right now we take a SD DVD and scale it to 960P and it looks very good, can anyone tell that half the lines are faked? No information has been added, no special processing has been done. Give it a couple of years, and we will look back and think we were in the Stone Age:)

Deron.

Hi Deron,

HDNet has a lot of great concerts and they are actually very good PQ wise as well. I'd say they are between HD lite and HD.

I'm going to go out on a bit of an OT limb and say that the three most important factors in a person's ability to discern image quality are image size, viewing distance and ambient light in the viewing environment.

As relative image size decreases and ambient light increases, the viewer's imagination "fills in the blanks" quite remarkably. In that case, even a very crappy image can appear to be very good.

Herve

Your so right. I remember in my youth, going to night clubs and seeing some very pretty women from across the room, only to be disappointed when I approach them:( Of course in this case, a little more booze and a little less light would of helped.

Deron.

Herve

Your so right. I remember in my youth, going to night clubs and seeing some very pretty women from across the room, only to be disappointed when I approach them:( Of course in this case, a little more booze and a little less light would of helped.

Deron.
Very funny!:D

They could end the format war, I could have someone give me a HD player, but I would still not be able to see any improvement. Almost everything I watch is not available to me in HD. 95% of my viewing is Concert DVD's. The other 5% is SD DVD's I pick up at yard sales for a buck or two. I'm what you call a yard sale adopter, I'm so far behind the times, by the time it gets to me, there is a new format out there:)

Deron.

Deron, perhaps you are right where you are supposed to be? Happiness is a rare find in videoland, you know. Staying the course may just be the best action. CMRA

I believe that all things being equal (and of couse they aren't) you just can't make 300,000 pixels look like 2,000,000.

Art

Art, is there a 't missing in your statement? "you just can" sounds (even to me, a non english native speaker) a bit wrong...

As for the subject, I was the one who raised the question in the first place (at least this time), and I got clobbered... ;) So until I have checked again with my new setup (1080i instead of 1152x864 and ATI Radeon HD2600 instead of GeForce 8500) I won't open my mouth...eh...keyboard again.

Art, is there a 't missing in your statement? "you just can" sounds (even to me, a non english native speaker) a bit wrong...

As for the subject, I was the one who raised the question in the first place (at least this time), and I got clobbered... ;) So until I have checked again with my new setup (1080i instead of 1152x864 and ATI Radeon HD2600 instead of GeForce 8500) I won't open my mouth...eh...keyboard again.

Yes,
Very important letter there ,thanks !:o

Art