How Much Difference does upscaling reqally make

davidisom

Established Member
Joined
Apr 4, 2007
Messages
203
Reaction score
19
Points
65
Location
CHORLEY
I would be interested in hearing from anybody who understands this more than I do.

Why is upscaling so much the rage?

I have tried viewing non hd content as standard and upscaled via either PS3 upscaling or Denon AVR-4308 and leaving the pnael to do its own thing LX508

To be honest I am not sure what I think.

Please feel free to educate me ..... Thanks
 
Last edited:
All flat panels must show content at the native resolution of the panel. So all non HD content is going to be upscaled by your TV anyway.

Whether or not you will notice a difference between externally upscaled material and material upscaled by your TV will depend on whether or not your TV's scaler is better than the external scaler.

Now Pioneer's have very good scalers , so you will be hard pushed to find a device with a better one. Thats probably why you find it difficult to tell.
 
All flat panels must show content at the native resolution of the panel. So all non HD content is going to be upscaled by your TV anyway.

Whether or not you will notice a difference between externally upscaled material and material upscaled by your TV will depend on whether or not your TV's scaler is better than the external scaler.

Now Pioneer's have very good scalers , so you will be hard pushed to find a device with a better one. Thats probably why you find it difficult to tell.

Surely, if his tv is better than his PS3 at upscaling, then he would see a difference. Hence the definition of better.

Personally, I find the same as the Op, it doesn't matter what device I leave to scale, I can find little to no difference between picture.
 
Surely, if his tv is better than his PS3 at upscaling, then he would see a difference. Hence the definition of better.

The PS3 has a very good upscaler , its known for it , as a matter of fact he PS3 is the reference blu ray player for most reviewers as it has such a good DVD scaler and is so fast to load blu rays... The Pioneer Kuros also have excellent scalers , how close the scalers are in quality dictates how much of a difference you will see , if they are evenly matched , then you will see no difference.

There arent many TVs that have as good a scaler as a Pioneer , products with inferior scalers will show a difference , products approaching the quality of the Pioneer will not. ( or will at least be very very difficult to see)

IF all your products are of a similar quality , then you could end up switching scaling on and off ad infinitum and see no difference.

Attach a budget product , like say one of those media center hard drives or a lidl DVD uspcaler , and you'll see the difference immediately.
Likewise , attach a PS3 to a lesser TV , say a philips or an LG for instance , and then turn the scaler on and off on the PS3 , and you will see a big difference.
 
Last edited:
The PS3 has a very good upscaler , its known for it , as a matter of fact he PS3 is the reference blu ray player for most reviewers as it has such a good DVD scaler and is so fast to load blu rays... The Pioneer Kuros also have excellent scalers , how close the scalers are in quality dictates how much of a difference you will see , if they are evenly matched , then you will see no difference.

There arent many TVs that have as good a scaler as a Pioneer , products with inferior scalers will show a difference , products approaching the quality of the Pioneer will not. ( or will at least be very very difficult to see)

IF all your products are of a similar quality , then you could end up switching scaling on and off ad infinitum and see no difference.

Attach a budget product , like say one of those media center hard drives or a lidl DVD uspcaler , and you'll see the difference immediately.
Likewise , attach a PS3 to a lesser TV , say a philips or an LG for instance , and then turn the scaler on and off on the PS3 , and you will see a big difference.

What execlty do you see .... i.e if the content that makes up the picture has not changed hoes does upscaling imprice the picture ?
 
What execlty do you see .... i.e if the content that makes up the picture has not changed hoes does upscaling imprice the picture ?

Uscaling does change the content of the picture , it interpolates and attempts to make an SD picture a HD equivalent.

What you should see would be like switching from an SD channel to a HD channel. Although never quite as good.
 
Uscaling does change the content of the picture , it interpolates and attempts to make an SD picture a HD equivalent.

What you should see would be like switching from an SD channel to a HD channel. Although never quite as good.

Upscaling merely changes the resolution of an SD picture to fit a HD resolution by 'guessing' what the missing pixels should be. Its how good this 'guessing' is that defines the better scalers. But it does not create a HD image, because it justs adds pixels based on the surrounding ones, but its still only an estimation and will not add real detail. Unlike a HD image which will already contain the detail without any 'guessing'.

The whole issue of upscaling (in anything other than dedicated devices) is overblown and to me is mainly used as a marketing tool to give another tick to the feature list of the DVD/BLURAY/AV AMP. There are many people who buy a HD Display, then think they have to go and buy a upscaling DVD player to go with it, not realising that their HD display will scale anyway. This is what the marketeers want.

I have four different devices capable of upscaling (two sources and two displays) and I honestly can see little to no difference no matter where I let the scaling take place. So I guess all my devices must all be equally as good as each other at scaling.
 
Upscaling merely changes the resolution of an SD picture to fit a HD resolution by 'guessing' what the missing pixels should be.

Yup , and thats called interpolation , usually your looking a 480i or p in or 567i or p in and something like 1280 x 720 or 1920 x 1080 out.

Bully for you that you have excellent screens and can afford such. In your situation upscaling makes no difference which is the case with most premium screens.

For the vast majority though , with more affordable budget screens , it does make a difference , and depending on the screen , a big difference.
 
The problem with scaling (and the associated deinterlacing) is that it's quite difficult to do it right in all circumstances. 90% of the time almost any deinterlacer/scaler will do - it's the 10% of cases that you really notice.

An example: I have an xbox which is used to play DVDs. I can use it in native (576i), 720p or 1080i mode. In all but the native mode (i.e. doing scaling once and letting the panel do it), I can see scaling artefacts - typically moire fringing around hard edges. A great example is the beginning of Harry Potter 5 - where he is on a swing. His glasses do not look "right" unless they are scaled by the panel. I also have a freesat box. On my main Pio, I get a better picture on SD channels if I output at 576i than if I let the box scale to 1080. On my bedroom TV (40" Goodmans LCD), I can't tell the difference between TV scaling and the box scaling... On the other hand, the Pio picture is miles ahead of the Goodmans picture, so you'd expect some differences!

Upscaling (and deinterlacing) IS important to do well, but only a proportion of people will notice the differences and probably even fewer actually care...
 
I would be interested in hearing from anybody who understands this more than I do.

Why is upscaling so much the rage?

I have tried viewing non hd content as standard and upscaled via either PS3 upscaling or Denon AVR-4308 and leaving the pnael to do its own thing LX508

To be honest I am not sure what I think.

Please feel free to educate me ..... Thanks

You must have put a photo on your pc, resized it (bigger) only to find it looks horrid close up.

That's what the tv or scaler etc is trying to accomodate making a small picture fit into a bigger frame with minimal artifacts.
 
Andy,

My point wasn't that I have excellent equipment (I haven't stated what I do have so you can't make that judgement, but one of my displays is a LG plasma which you disparaged in an earlier post) but that there is little to no difference between what I do have due to their scaling abilities. I honestly believe, their isn't much difference in scaling done by devices which aren't dedicated scalers. And even in the dedicated scalers I think most of their improvement comes from the deinterlacing and not the scaling.

The OP question was 'how much difference does upscaling really make?' from my point of view it doesn't make any difference. However some people do find a difference, but be careful that difference which might be attributed to upscaling isn't due to better deinterlacing or the fact that the new device has better video processing or merely the Tv is not properly calibrated for the new/old device or a number of other things which could affect the picture quality, that have nothing to do with the fact the device upscaled the image.
 
Last edited:
Point taken ,

However there is a wide range of devices for de-intelacing/scaling.
I lump the two together because for the vast majority of devices out there the function is carried out by the same single chip.

Its only when you get to the mid-high end of the market that the functions are separated out , and you get things like the achor bay chipset which separates out the functions and you get better quality as a result.

After that you go into individual proprietary electronic designs and things get better still.

And indeed you then get to the top end where you have separate video processors.

Given the right combination and the variation in chipsets upscaling can make a huge improvement depending on where in the AV market you are.
( entry level to high end)

It is by no means a " marketing ploy " .

As an example the Oppo upscaling DVD player , which gets lauded on here a lot , has a separate anchor bay de-interlacer and anchor bay scaler. That player in combination with entry to mid level screens makes an enormous difference and is well worth the spend.
 
Last edited:
Ok, Andy Interesting debate.

Would you agree that in £20 upscaling supermarket DVD players that its mainly a gimmick to add to the feature list?

The problem really, as you keep saying, is that its the full combination of your equipment, rather than a simple, this DVD player is good at upscaling and therefore is better than your display. There is no simple answer to what is better at upscaling. I have not seen an Oppo in action, so yet remain to be convinced that it will make that much difference, but that of course does not mean it doesn't.

You mention Anchor Bay, I'm am also aware of Faroudja. Are these the two main companies that supply upscaling chips? Could it be that I don't see a difference because essentially all my devices have the same upscaling chip?
 
Something a lot of people forget about Oppo is that they also spent a lot of time choosing the best MPEG-decoder chip.

This sort of thing all gets very complicated, but good upscaling should make a big difference where reasonable upscaling doesn't already exist. On smaller (i.e. <50") sizes from "normal" living room viewing distances, differences become more difficult to pick up on anyway.
 
Would you agree that in £20 upscaling supermarket DVD players that its mainly a gimmick to add to the feature list?

Yes , definitely , I agree with that , some of those players make things worse instead of better.


These are the chipsets I would be most familiar with.

Anchor Bay VRS
Silicon Optix HQV
Sigma Designs VXP

There are others , but out of those Anchor bay are probably the best imo.
 
Last edited:

The latest video from AVForums

TV Buying Guide - Which TV Is Best For You?
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Back
Top Bottom