Reply #4: Disagree strongly [View All]

[Xithras]

I own an older (two years) Toshiba DR5 DVD Recorder that does 480P, 720P, and 1080i upsampling and the image quality is awesome. Is it HD-DVD quality? Not quite, but it's FAR better than standard DVD, and the difference isn't worth the $500+ that a good quality HD movie player will set you back. Did I mention that it has HDMI out? And that the last time I saw one on sale, it was only $120 at Sears?

I'm in no hurry to upgrade my DVD player to HD. The upsampled quality looks great (on my 42" Panasonic plasma), and I have no interest in buying this generations Betamax. I'll worry about moving to HD movie disks when the format war is settled, or when movies start appearing ONLY in one format or another and my choices become limited.

By the way, there IS a middle road here if you don't want to waste money on a temporary solution. A lot of decent receivers nowadays have high quality upconverting chipsets in them which can take an incoming component video connection and output an upsampled HDMI signal. If your DVD player supports progressive scan and you have any need for a receiver, this may be a good solution since the receiver can remain in use when you DO decide to buy an HDDVD or Blu Ray player.

On edit: Almost forgot. I don't know who told you that "the LCD TV automatically upconverts 480i signals", but AFAIK that isn't true in most cases. There are some LCD's out there that will upconvert digital SD signals to 480P internally, and a handful that will try to upconvert a native 480P signal (from a progressive scan DVD player or other EDTV digital source) to 720P or 1080i, but they are a minority. Most LCD and Plasma TV's will simply display whatever the incoming signal is, irregardless of its resolution.

Most HDTV's do include noise reduction and color correction circuits to improve the picture quality of interlaced SD signals, but that's not the same thing as upconverting and doesn't approach the quality of a good upconverted signal.