[John Mason]

From what I read on all those forums, a large number of threads are devoted to various methods and different hardware for upscaling DVDs. That usually involves both deinterlacing and varying the scan format. As you may know, 540p can be displayed on a 1080i-compatible set because of similar scan rates between the two. Everyone has their favorite tweaking/upscaling technique (home-theater computers, scalers, etc.). After investing time and money in the effort, it's understandable why most proclaim their images to be the very best.


Suspect the upscaling with your set, like that with other NTSC images, depends a lot on the quality of the original image. Extensive digital manipulation of a poor-quality signal usually produces an even poorer quality result--especially on large-screen sets that magnify the image defects. Upscale a noisy 480i cable signal to 540p, for example, and you can expect horrible results.


Generally, think you want to minimize the digital manipulation of images, unless you can afford $six-figure processors. So that might be why the reviewer used "unfortunately." With a given DVD or other signal source, providing there's a means of bypassing the 480-to-540p conversion, it should be easy to compare what provides the best images. Just speculation, but the RCA upscaling circuit might recognize an incoming signal as being 480p and simply pass it through without further processing. Some set makers (Hitachi I believe) are processing all NTSC up to 540p. That enables them to operate--no doubt less expensively--at a single scan rate rather than switching between 15+ kHz and HDTV's 30+ kHz rate. -- John

 

[John Mason]

Suspect the Dreamcast produces similar results to what I view with my cable converter viewing analog channels via S-video. The analog channels are separated into color and luminance for S-video by a cheap filter in the converter. The result in dot-crawl, especially visible along horizontal colored lines, plus overall interference in the images due to the NTSC chroma/luminance interaction. It's a 'busy' image. A component or RF output, using my set's comb filter, provides a better image most of the time. At times it's a balance: accept a little interference for the enhanced contrast sometimes achieved with S-video. In comparison, the digital channels are delivered preseparated into chroma and luminance and look great via S-video. I'd edited by last graph earlier and that might answer your Xbox query. -- John