[Kidd Digital]

I have a Hitachi plasma (42HDT20) that looks pretty poor on SD signals. The scaler in the set is pretty poor quality, and could really use some help from a good external scaler.


The Hitachi ALiS displays are 1024x1024, which means it doesn't scale 1080 at all. In everyone's experience, which HD solutions have done the best 480->1080 conversion?


I'm willing to consider E*, D*, or Comcast. Whatever fits my needs the best.

I'd love to have a PVR that did this for me, but I don't think such a beast exists. I also don't think I can afford a stand alone scaler to do it for me. I'm thinking $600-$700 max.

 

[Steve S]

The current Zenith 520 and Sony HD-200 (both made by LG) are generally thought to have the best 480i to 1080i upconversion. The aspect ratio choices for 4/3 480i material are:


Normal--gray bars on the side of a 4/3 picture.


Wide--uniform horizontal stretch, no pic lost at top and bottom but everything's short and fat.


Panorama--variable stretch, no pic lost at top, more stretch at sides than at edges, lotsa funhouse mirror effect on horizontal pans or CNN newscrawls.


Zoom 1--complete horizontal stretch combined with about half vertical stretch. Loses a bit of pic at top and bottom, just enough to cover the CNN crawl, and geometry is still a bit short and fat but not nearly as bad as with Wide mode.


Zoom 2--uniform vertical and horizontal zoom--geometry is unaffected but more picture is lost top and bottom than with Zoom 1.