Who should convert?

[flyingpickle]

I have a new 50" Panasonic plasma that does 720, not 1080. I have an upconverting DVD player that can cycle through outputting as 480, 720, 1080i, and 1080p.

The upconverting DVD player is hooked up to the plasma via HDMI.

The way I see it, for optimal picture quality, I have one of the 3 choices. I just don't know which one is best.

Is it best to:

(1) Leave the upconverting DVD player at 480 and let the TV handle the upconverting to its native 720 resolution?
(2) Set the upconverting DVD player to 720 since that's the TV's native resolution?
(3) Set the upconverting DVD player to 1080p and let the TV downconvert it to 720?

My guess is that option 3 is the worst option since we'd now have the signal being processed in two separate stages rather than just one.

I'm wondering if this basically comes down to a question of which device does a better job of upconverting.

Thanks for your help. These boards rule!

[unique]

it depends on what dvd player you have and if the upscaling of that is better than the upscaling of the screen. if it's a sub £100 player then the far more expensive tv is probably going to be better, but it's a case of suck it and see. try the 3 options with the same scene on the same dvd and see what looks better. either 1 or 2 would probably make sense

[pdbmjb]

I have a sony 50" which is 720 but I got better pq with both the panasonic s52 and a ps3 set to 1080i also got very good results with an old sony 725 set to 575i.I think to make use of the 1080p you need a 1080p screen , as mentioned try the different settings and see which looks best in your eyes.

Regards Martin

[imjay]

As posted already it depends on which device has the better up scaling/converting image processor and software.

Our personal experience is that our HD TV does a nice job of upscaling via a component input from our dvd player BUT the same player sends up converted image via HDMI output it looks better on the same tv.

Our Panasonic front projector doesn't upscale nearly as well as our dvd player.

DVD player is a Sony bought new in the US for about $120 US Dollars. If I knew for sure a more expensive and better dvd player would render a visually better up converted image I would buy it but, for now, our standard def dvds just look so doggone good I'm in no hurry to spend more loot.

We are thankful we discovered up scaling/up conversion before we abandoned our large dvd collection and bought into the terrible price of BluRay and all new movies.
goodluck