The “Break it Down” Blog

A heated topic on most A/V forums, especially when talking about HD content, is deciding which component should handle upscaling in your chain of components. Which one do you let handle upscaling?

• Media Device (DVD Player?)
• Set Top Box?
• Receiver?
• TV?

Well ‘Smeeg‘ over on AVS put together a hell of a post discussing the steps he took to correct all the noise he was seeing on his new Mitsubishi WD-65831 during sporting events (a common complaints for folks that own Samsungs and some of the bigger sets, they tend to notice more ‘noise’).

As it turns out that the scaler a lot of people may be ignoring (the one on your TV) could actually be superior to every other scaler in your Video chain and you might consider setting your devices to output their native format (say 480p for DVD player) and let the TV handle the rest. Have a look at ‘Smeeg’’s post below:

i’m posting this here because i think it applies to all three of the new Mits DLPs.

saturday and sunday, i was getting a little frustrated with my 57831 because i was seeing more artifacts/distortions on the HD feeds of college and pro football. fox football yesterday was bad, but cbs college ball and their nfl coverage was awful. it didn’t really appear like motion artifacting as i know it, it appeared more like there was some trouble displaying out of focus images, like the green grass in the background of a running football player) or quick panning of the camera across the field. i was getting ‘blockiness’ in a lot of these kinds of shots while the still and focused images where more what one expects from an 1080p hd television. then watching the sunday night coverage on nbc the picture improved, and everything again seemed right in the world.

but i was frustrated. these problems only really seemed to pop up during live sporting events. i went through a process of elimination like whether my coax splitter was degrading the signal too much. basically i wanted to be sure that my television was not to blame. in addition, my oppo looked good, but i wasn’t getting that real HD feel for the upconverted DVDs like i was expecting. in the end, i realized that my motorola dvr box from cox sucks @ss and was the weak link in the chain.

basically i wasn’t utilizing the real power of these new mits TVs — their ability to upconvert SD and HD material to their native format of 1080p — i’m assuming this applies to all three models. the problem i was having was due in part to the format that i was sending to the tv from the cable box, mainly signals that were being upconverted to 1080i by the STB. most of the material on the networks is being broadcast in 720p, (if it’s 1080i material, almost every channel highlights that fact at the beginning of the show when they mention that it’s offered in HD widescreen). so i was basically letting this crappy old motorola dvr upconvert all HD signals from a progressive 720 to an interlaced 1080, while keeping my 4:3 SD channels at 480p. that’s the right setting for SD, but not the setting you want to use for HD unless the source material is being broadcast in 1080i. Here’s what the DVE people have to say about it:

“Joe Kane Productions is strongly backing all progressive formats over any interlaced video option. Progressive images look better when objects in the pictures are in motion. A progressive image is complete in itself where an interlaced image is often different between the first and second half of the video signal. The differences between the two halves of the picture show up as interlaced artifacts. The vertical resolution of an interlaced signal has to be filtered in order to reduce the visibility of these artifacts. That reduces the real image resolution far below the scan numbers associated with the format. Digital compression of images, which is necessary to make them fit into the space allocated for a broadcasting TV channel or a D-Theater tape, is far more efficient with progressive video at the source than interlaced video.”

so yesterday i changed the output settings on my cable box. now all HD material is transferred in 720p and all SD is sent at 480p, standard 4:3. this made a world of difference. monday night football on espn was much smoother than almost every game i’ve seen so far, although nbc’s sunday night pregame makes me wonder whether they are broadcasting in 1080i. either way, if you have a basic dvr or HD box from your local cable company you should really be outputting HD in 720p so the signal passes directly to the tv from the cable box. if the material is 1080i native, like some of the shows on discoveryHD and the HDnet channels, then change your cable box to output to that resolution. the key is to let the tv do what it does best. try to always send video in its native resolution and let the tv do all of the processing involved in upconversion.

last night, i decided to run a similar test on my new oppo 971. now there seems to be some disagreement on what is the best format to output from the oppo, 720p or 1080i. i had set the oppo up to output all video in 1080i, and what i realized immediately last night is the 831 (and the other 2 models i assume) does a much better job of upconverting to 1080 than the oppo. the oppo does wonderful things upconverting standard DVD material to 720p but the mits excels in upconverting from 720p to 1080. i watched parts of Empire Strikes Back and changed the settings on the oppo back and forth for comparision. there wasn’t any comparison because the level of detail when the oppo was set to 720p wiped the floor with what i was seeing with the player set to 1080i. if you have any brand of upconverting dvd player (even the higher end models should test this) i highly recommend setting your output to 720p and let the tv do the work.

i apologize if this is common knowledge but it made such a vast improvent in picture quality for me that i felt that i should share this info for those who haven’t considered these settings. the inconvenient fact is that i’ll have to change the output on the STB anytime i’m watching 1080i material on cable. the obvious solution is to get a cable card and let the tv do all the processing without having to worry about constantly changing the cable box. i love the DVR and won’t be giving it up, but i don’t have to use it as my primary tuner, so i’m not going to.

anyway, hope this will be useful info for some. i’ve been fine tuning my picture settings and am getting really happy with the results. i’ll be posting that info along with this over on the 831 owners thread.