Verification of DVD Observation

I read an interesting bit of information in today's Wall Street Journal on page B5. Walter Mossberg, the technical reviewer for the newspaper got a question in his Mossberg's Mailbox. A reader asked about what type of new high definition DVD player they should get.

He reported that Blu-Ray has appeared to won over the studios but that they should consider a upverting DVD player. A quote from the column, "I have found that... "upscaling" DVD players are effective at making most regular DVDs look better on high-definition TV sets. " He goes on to say that brand name players can be found for as low as $45.

So he does not exactly say that the picture produced is just about the same but the test I did they looked very close in quality to each other.

BluRay vs Upvert DVD

Recently, I visited one of my friends who has a Playstation 3 that contains a Bluray player. We compared Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl normal DVD with the Bluray version. He has a 65" DLP Toshiba HDTV and the picture looked nice.

After comparing the same scenes for several minutes, I found it hard to tell the difference between the two movies. Maybe it was the DVD player since the PS3 costs $300+. I need to compare our $40 upvert DVD player with a PS3 and see if the upverting is different.

I did not measure the picture size of each so it is possible one is larger than the other. They seemed the same size but should have measured just to make sure.

So we decided to hold off on getting a HD DVD player until the price comes down on the players and movies.

After playing some more movies on our upvert DVD player, we found some that will pause briefly while showing the movie. It is like it is having a decoding issue or something. So I put the old DVD player back in place so we have a choice of playing the movie on either player.

Upvert DVD Player

A while back I spotted a Philips 1080i DVD player at Walmart for $40. It was small, thin silver box that I found it intriguing but wondered if we should replace our current standard DVD player.

I meant to someday test out the a player to see if it really made a difference in viewable screen size. Well, my wife surprised me by getting me one for Christmas. So I got to test it out and it does increase the viewable movie on our TV by approximately 18%.

My test involved Lord of the Rings: Return of the King Extended Edition with the 1st DVD being played in the old DVD player and the 2nd in the newer DVD player. I then used a ruler to measure the increase in height of the picture. The movie still does not fill the entire screen so I guess that occurs when HD or Blu-ray movies are displayed.

Hopefully, I will be able to test this out soon.