BLUE RAY or HD DVD PLAYERS

[dvddiva]

Hi guys,
I heard that Blue Ray dvd players are out ,but only in Japan.Does anybody know anything about them?All I heard was that at present
they are not backward compatible with current dvd's.
High definition dvp's are supposedly backward compatible.
If an HD dvd player will up-convert a standard dvd from 480i
to 720p doesn't that also require the tv to have up conversion
capabilities? For example,the SONY KLVS40A10 40inch LCD has
a native resolution of 720p,but it does not have upconversion
technology.so what type of picture will be shown? 720p or 480i?
Any help with my questions would be appreciated.

[yoda313]

at present
they are not backward compatible with current dvd's.

??????

I thought that was the whole point of making them the same size and general specs of current dvds???? Don't they have mpeg2 decoding????? I had assumed you could put any current dvd in one of them?????

[Bob Harris]

I read in The Inquirer that Samsung was going to come out with a players that will do all formats hd-dvd, blu-ray, DVD, and cd.

[edDV]

Hi guys,
I heard that Blue Ray dvd players are out ,but only in Japan.Does anybody know anything about them?All I heard was that at present
they are not backward compatible with current dvd's.

True, but US models will play normal DVDs. I would assume Euro models will too.

High definition dvp's are supposedly backward compatible.

dvp's?

If an HD dvd player will up-convert a standard dvd from 480i
to 720p doesn't that also require the tv to have up conversion
capabilities?

Your 720p HDTV already has upconversion capability from either 480i or progressive 480p DVDs using your current normal DVD player. CRT HDTV's and projectors often give the additional option for direct 480p scan with no upconversion.

It us usually best to do progressive conversion in the DVD player and scaling in the HDTV. Mileage will vary by type of TV.

A HD DVD player will also have the option to upscale 480i/480p/576i/576p normal DVDs to 720p or 1080i or 1080p. Compare the results. My bet is the HDTV internal scaler-deinterlacer gets better results in most cases. The TV design engineers optimized the TV scaler to play normal DVD.

Unless your set is exactly 1280x720 or 1920x1080 native resolution, your DVD 720x480/576 native image will get double scaled if you use the DVD player scaler. 1080i conversion will also loose the benefits of progressive scan, or worse it will interlace the native 480p/24 DVD and then the TV will try to deinterlace that. Multiple conversions are usually give a bad result.

For example,the SONY KLVS40A10 40inch LCD has
a native resolution of 720p,but it does not have upconversion
technology.so what type of picture will be shown? 720p or 480i?
Any help with my questions would be appreciated.

If your set accepts analog or 480i/480p inputs then it has internal scaling. Everything gets converted to the native LCD screen resolution with progressive scan. In the case of your set, native display resolution is 1366 x 768, not 1280x720 so even 720p inputs get scaled.