Overscan and upscaling DVD players

[liwp]

I was wondering whether people are disabling overscan on their screens when using upscaling DVD players or not. I would expect that you would get better PQ by letting the player scale up to the screens native resolution and disabling overscan on the screen, so that screen does not scale the image further. Is there enough of a difference in PQ to warrant buying a screen with a 1-to-1 pixel mapping feature? Unfortunately I don't have a screen to test this with at the moment :-(

-- Liwp

[Timbo21]

Yes, you're perfectly right. You would ideally disable overscan with upscaling players. However, since many flat panels have pc resolutions, such as 1366X768p, the screen will need to do some scaling anyway. Only if you have 1280X720p, or 1980X1080p, native resolution will you get 1:1 pixel mapping.

There are video processors which will scale to pc resolutions, but then there aren't many flat panels that will let you bypass their internal scaler, and accept an external resolution of 768p, or similar pc type. If you are planning on buying a video processor in the £1K upwards region, then I think it would be well worth finding a screen that will accept it's native res., eg 1366X768, or whatever it is. I believe it's either Pioneer, or Panasonic who do a range of plasmas that do this.

[neilmcl]

Originally Posted by Timbo21

Yes, you're perfectly right. You would ideally disable overscan with upscaling players.

Why would this ideally be the right thing to do. Overscan is a completely normal and accepted practice in broadcasting and film production, particularly with SD sources. Just because you're upscaling doesn't mean the information outside the safe viewing area which isn't meant to be viewed, the overscan area in other words, has disappeared.

[liwp]

Originally Posted by neilmcl

Why would this ideally be the right thing to do. Overscan is a completely normal and accepted practice in broadcasting and film production, particularly with SD sources.

Disclaimer: all my thinking is based on having an Oppo 981 player scaling to 1080p and a screen with 1080 native resolution connected to the player over HDMI. I should've mentioned this in my initial post. Obviously the discussion applies also for other setups, but as Timbo21 mentioned it's not as clear cut with screens that have a native resolution of 768.

I would expect to get a significantly better PQ if you disable the screen's scaler and simply let the DVD player scale the image up to 1080p. If the screen's scaler is enabled, it will scale the image by a further 3-5% (?) in order to allow for overscan. This would result in a 1112-1134 line image and the lines would no longer match the physical lines on the screen which will result in a lower PQ.

Whereas if you disable overscan the already scaled 1080 line image from the DVD player will match each line on the screen.

Originally Posted by neilmcl

Just because you're upscaling doesn't mean the information outside the safe viewing area which isn't meant to be viewed, the overscan area in other words, has disappeared.

Assuming that you are using an HDMI connection, will there be anything in the overscan area? And more importantly, will it be somehow bad for the screen?

-- Liwp