HDMI Upscaling Question - 1080 to 720

[tbuckland1215]

Afternoon

I am running a Sony RDR HXD 790 HD DVD recorder through my Samsung 42" plasma.

I recently tried connecting it through HDMI rather than scart to try and upscale, but the picture was no better for DVDs and dreadful at transmitting the freeview signal from the DVD recorder (even when using a £45 Monster HDMI cable!).

My TV is HD ready 720p while my DVD recorder upscales at 1080p - is this where my problem lies and is there any way I can get a decent picture through HDMI and free up my RGB scart socket?

I have gone back to scart from the moment - much cheaper at least !

Cheers
Tom

 

[IanTHarvey]

Your DVDR will upscale to whatever your TV tells the DVDR it supports - 720p in this case. You shouldn't expect a standard definition picture to be any better via HDMI, the only difference is that the upscaling is done on the DVDR rather than the TV.

There's quite a bit on this site about HDMI cables interfering with Freeview reception, especially expensive ones, go figure. Have a search.

 

[Gavtech]

My TV is HD ready 720p while my DVD recorder upscales at 1080p - is this where my problem lies and is there any way I can get a decent picture through HDMI and free up my RGB scart socket?

Yes - There is no point in scaling up to 1080p if the TV just has to rescale it back down to 720p... albeit I am surprised it is even possible for you to output at this level if the TV is 720p.

HDMI communicates back to the DVDR the capabilities of the TV ... and any resolutions that the TV cannot handle should be greyed out of the options.

Try lower settings.

 

[Pincho Paxton]

The DVD Recorder has a lot of picture settings for HDMI picture quality. You might need to tweak the settings to get a better picture. messing with the Blacks, and Whites will help, and make sure that your TV does not have its sharpness up too high.