SXRD with upconverting DVD - 720p or 1080i?

[spf]

I know that there are not many people around yet who have purchased a Sony SXRD or JVC D-ILA TV but edtyct and some others have mentionned it so I thought I'd make this thread to get a general concensus. I have the 50" SXRD and an Oppo 970HD upconverting DVD player. I have been going back and forth between 720p and 1080i and by the slimmest margin, I'm preferring 720p. Has this been the case for anyone else? Also, do you think its relevent to consider getting a 1080p uncoverting player (New Oppo 981HD comes to mind) or is that simply another money grab when you are still talking about a 480 resolution base. Thanks

Shane

[edtyct]

Shane,

An upgrade to a 1080p upconverting DVD player is for people with lots of disposable income. If the processing in the Sony SXRD is halfway decent (it is), 1080i upconversion should be fine. The priority should be to match the pixel counts. The TV can take care of the interlacing. But, to tell you the truth, even though the scaling from a DVD player can be marginally more effective than that provided by a TV itself, I'd have trouble recommending that anyone upgrade to an upconverting DVD player if it weren't so damned cheap to do.

I don't know why your 720p scaling should look better than your 1080i scaling, unless the SXRD's deinterlacing were visibly flawed. But I tested an SXRD's processing with the HQV disk at 480i, and though it wasn't particularly quick to pick up the 2:3 film cadence, no glitches were noticeable with real-world material. I couldn't test it at 1080i, but none of the 1080i-native or 1080i-upconverted films that I've watched suffered from conspicuous processing artifacts. It's conceivable, however, that deinterlacing with the Oppo does more good than scaling with the SXRD does harm. If that's what you see, I can't argue.

Ed

[spf]

Thanks Ed,

It could be that I'm just staring at the image too long as well LOL. After my DVE calibration, I am very happy with the results and I'm still on 720p for now. For the future, whenever the PS3 gets down to a reasonable price, I'll have a looksie at that because from what I've heard, it's a respectable Blu-Ray player.

Shane