This Pioneer Elite has excellent upconversion (also called scaling). But even more important, many of the popular Samsung DVD players on sale right now have serious problems. Check the DVD forum here.
However, if you use a good player that will scale up the signal the choice is really yours based on your own eyes. Basically the issue is whether the player or the display does a better job. Scalers are optimized in different ways. More important is to make a digital connection (HDMI or DVI) to the display to eliminate extra conversion steps between analog and digital. Since the film industry frowns on upconversion via analog video outputs such as component cables (since they offer no copy protection), you'll find that the better upconverting DVD players will only put out higher resolutions on their digital outputs. Their component outputs will be limited to no higher than 480p. This is different from cable and satellite TV set top boxes which will also put out 720p or 1080i on component cables as well as on digital outputs.
I think if you do some thread searching here and in the DVD player forum, you'll find a fairly significant bias for folks who like to set their better quality DVD players to do the upconversion. In particular, folks with the Pioneer Elite 59avi DVD player seem to be pretty much in agreement that they prefer to have it upconvert before sending the data by HDMI to their Pioneer Elite plasma.
--Bob
However, if you use a good player that will scale up the signal the choice is really yours based on your own eyes. Basically the issue is whether the player or the display does a better job. Scalers are optimized in different ways. More important is to make a digital connection (HDMI or DVI) to the display to eliminate extra conversion steps between analog and digital. Since the film industry frowns on upconversion via analog video outputs such as component cables (since they offer no copy protection), you'll find that the better upconverting DVD players will only put out higher resolutions on their digital outputs. Their component outputs will be limited to no higher than 480p. This is different from cable and satellite TV set top boxes which will also put out 720p or 1080i on component cables as well as on digital outputs.
I think if you do some thread searching here and in the DVD player forum, you'll find a fairly significant bias for folks who like to set their better quality DVD players to do the upconversion. In particular, folks with the Pioneer Elite 59avi DVD player seem to be pretty much in agreement that they prefer to have it upconvert before sending the data by HDMI to their Pioneer Elite plasma.
--Bob
