News PS3 may upscale DVDs soon

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/03/05/PS3_may_upscale_DVDs_soon/

 

Sounds like another "Sony Story"

After Europe getting the shaft from Sony repeatedly over the PS3, I don't care if this gets up and makes the tea in the morning, I won't be getting one out of principle

 

Upscaling DVD players have been widely available here for a while.

 

I'll have to agree with the baboon, even here in Finland you can buy upscaling DVD/media players.

Some have done it right (expensive) and some have not (the cheaper ones), but the bottom line is that they are available.

I've never been a console kind of guy and even if PS3 could upscale DVDs, it does the upscaling with software based algorithms and not with a decent hardware based solution (which I'd like to have), so even if the price of the damn thing was right, there is not much sense to buy it (for me anyways).

I'll keep my PCs running and my TV for other purposes

Just my 0,02$...

Janne

 

Yeah, kind of a "so what" moment. You have to remember that all of the current batch of hi-def players are distinctly consumer-level. None of the high end manufacturers have even announced a hi-def players, most are content to stay with upscaling DVD. You can be sure, however, that as soon as one of the top tier players jumps into the hi-def water, then those players will upscale non-HD content from the get go.

 

Might be a case of "too little, too late" methinks. So it'll upscale DVDs.. yay. Wait, doesn't my DVD player that cost me less then 600$ do that already?

 

Not enough to make me want to buy one again.

 

I dont get all this upscalling business. I have seen alot of HDMI DVD players that upscale but why would you want that?? Trying to blow up a picture surely distorts the picture.

Its not like in the movies where they can blow up a grainy black and white picture form a security camera in an off licence to a resolution higher than what my PC can out put with a sharp clear picture.

It seems pointless. My TV card outputs 640 x 480 and if I maximise the picture to my screen resolution of 1280 x 1024 then its grainy and distorted.

When are they going to sell HMDI VHS players that can upscale to 1080p Thats gotta be nasty.

 

Perfect for watching those old home video tapes

 

I have to throw a little amendment in here - as darkened said right below baboon, the few upscalers that have done a halfway decent job were always very expensive - reading over my article, I completely left out a key part of my sentence. I will edit now

 

Upscaling is more than just enalrging an image (at least it is on the higher end upscaling players). There's a lot of clever (i.e. variable angle) interpolation going on, smoothing to remove jaggies and processing to avoid pixellation.

 

it depends on the algorithms used, if you just plain upscale it - yes

however, Bit tech did mention before how you could practically upscale your DVD movies to look as good/better then HD/BD discs (which BTW - a lot are actually up scaled Dvds anyway cos Hollywood is too lazy to do it right, and they cheap out on it and do a bad job, so you can actually do it better)

 

If it can up scale, it will def be a big help to the sales, but probably is a little late now, but i remember one the sony bravia tv's that up scaled the picture, to near high def quality, it did a very good job of it, but i think that was hardware based, but if the up-scale is software based, if they do it right, which they will need to or ps3 will die on its feet, it would make the machine in my opinion a slightly better buy!

 

Good for sony but. toshiba already have two upscaling HD-DVD.
the HD-A2 can do 720p/1080I and the HD-XA2 can do 480p/720p/1080i/1080p. the HD-XA2 is powered by Silicon Optix Reon HQV, so I don't think the PS3 can do better video processing than that .

 

All hdtv`s upscale sd-material, so this really isn`t needed unless ps3 can do it better. And btw, the oppo upscaling dvd players are said to be awesome and they`re cheap.