I have noticed that several DVD recorders which have HDMI connectors offer up-sampling when using this connection to HD-ready TVs. Does this offer any advantage over viewing the DVD at it’s native resolution? Is there anything about the HDMI interface which mandates such up-sampling?
Yes, I noticed a palpable difference on my friend’s set. I’m not really qualified to say anything more than that, though. Not really an expert in HD. It did look very nice (for a DVD on a HD set) and it did look noticeably better than straight DVD.
[ioPopular Mechanics* did a comparison between an el cheapo DVD player that could up-sample and one of the new, uber expensive HD-DVD players. The result? They said to buy the el cheapo unit, the quailty was nearly identical, and it had none of the annoying drawbacks of the HD-DVD unit (like a 2 minute boot up time, limited selection, etc., etc., etc.).
I think the main advantage is your DVD player might have a better scaler than your TV. For example, a resize algorithm that works in the frequency domain could be cheaper to implement as part of the DVD player, because the video on a DVD is already stored that way. But if you’re paying $thousands for a TV, it probably has a decent scaler in it already.