HDTV with 720p native questions

[Savarak]

My HDTV is 720p native... it can accept up to 1080i as input... my HD-DVD player can upscale regular DVDs to 720p or 1080i... Should I have my HD-DVD player output at 720p or 1080i? With 720p its direct, with 1080i my TV has to downscale it back to 720p...

Which would have the better image quality?

 

[blurredvision]

This is only my best guess, but I'd imagine that the less converting you'd have to do, the better. If your TV is 720p native, then feed it 720p material. It just doesn't seem productive to upscale DVD's to an ultrahigh interlaced resolution, then back down to a progressive resolution. Cut out the 1080i middleman.

 

[mercanucaribe]

720p would look better of course.

 

[gsellis]

I am with BlurredVision on scaling. And without knowing how well each does what, I would assume that your Toshiba player would scale better because of the processor horsepower. But I could be wrong.

 

[Rio Rebel]

ALl of these responses are spot on - in most cases, you want to match the output of the player to the native resolution of the television.

There are some exceptions, though. If I remember correctly, the first generation HD-DVD players didn't output in 720p very well, and the 1080i output looked better even on 720p displays. Also, I believe the PS3 (before its latest firmware update) could not scale 1080i material to 720p, so if you forced it to output 720p it would fall back to 480p. I'm not positive about that, but I think that's what I remember.

Anyway, the bottom line is to test it out for yourself. You should expect it to look better by feeding 720p to the tv, but it may not, and if it doesn't, do a little research to find out if it's a special case.

 

[mercanucaribe]

Actually if your TV is 1366x768, which it probably is, DVD player scaling would result in the image being scaled twice... It might look better if you send the original stream to the TV.

 

[Savarak]

The tv is really 1366x768... if i upscale it to 1080i, then let it bring it back down, wouldn't it still have like 48 more pixels?