December 17, 2006

  • I still do not have an HDTV yet, but my parents recently went and got themselves one. They got a 50 inch 1080p capable DLP HDTV for $1500, and wow did the picture clarity look sooo good. This is my very first time to be completely hands on to test out the next-gen of television, and besides the picture, the first thing I wanted to test out was how viable my current huge DVD collection looks on it.

    Using a regular DVD movie disc with a standard DVD player, connected to the HDTV, I've got to say damn did it look so bad it's
    embarassing. It's no different than when you try and enlarge a video clip from the internet, and notice the pixelated artifacts a lot more. Basically, the DVD looks worse on an HDTV than if it was on a standard TV screen. I've expected this to happen, but I didn't realize that I couldn't live with that kind of quality.

    Then I tried the same regular DVD but upconverted this
    time, using my brother's upconverting DVD player (using HDMI for a pure digital connection), and it looked totally fine. The upconverter DVD player upscaled the movie into a pretty clear picture that makes it looked a bit better than if it was on a standard TV. It still wasn't super high-definition clarity mind you, but I can
    completely live with it.

    I then even tried that same regular DVD using my xbox 360 with it's component
    cables, and it actually looked decent. It surprisingly looked better
    than playing it on a standard DVD player, but it wasn't as good as the
    dedicated HDMI upconverter DVD player. Still, using my xbox 360 as my future upconverter DVD player is a good possibility, whenever it is I do purchase an HDTV (probably a 37 inch - 40 inch 1080p capable LCD HDTV). So far at least, I did get to use the xbox 360's high definition functions for the first time, and damn did the games look great.

    Now with this recent experience, it's now even more tempting to buy an HDTV and videos that support it. However, I'm still not supporting HD-DVD or Blu-ray though, until a good
    affordable dual player shows up, or until the studios sort out this dual format mess. Don't have any idea when that's
    happening, so I'm going to stick with upconverting DVDs when I finally
    purchase an HDTV sometime next year. Honestly though, I may just completely avoid HD-DVD or Blu-ray, and treat them like I treated Laserdisc when VHS was king; basically mostly ignored.

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