Should I get a Philips DVP3960/37 or an RCA DRC279?

[ntruax]

Can someone please help me decide between these two players? The Philips has HDMI, plays DivX and upconverts to 1080i. The RCA has HDMI and upconverts to 1080p but it doesn't play DivX. I'm gonna get one or the other and I need to decide which one I'd rather get. I wanted one that plays DivX but it's not absolutely necessary. My TV's native resolution is 720p so should I go with the Philips 1080i or the RCA with 1080p? Thanks.

[mats.hogberg]

If your TV doesn't support 1080p, a 1080p player is a waste. But you'll mabe get a new TV? OTOH, I'd never give up on AVI/DivX playback...

/Mats

[ntruax]

I just thought having the 1080p upconverter was supposed to give you a better picture even if your TV didn't support it. I'm not gonna be getting a new TV any time soon. I've only had this one for 5 days and it's only a 26" (Toshiba 26HL67). I decided not to worry about 1080p because of the size, I kept reading it wouldn't matter until you got up to 32" or more? That and I didn't even see any 26" LCD's with 1080p.

[ntruax]

Is all that stuff I've read about the scaler in the dvd player usually being better than the one in the TV wrong? There's a very lengthy article on AVS about it that says the better the signal you feed the TV the better the picture will be (usually). Even if it's higher than the TV's native resolution. Unless they don't know what they're talking about...

[jman98]

If your TV doesn't do 1080i or 1080p, then it will scale down to 720p if it is an HDTV. I have a 1080p HDTV and since ATSC doesn't support that for broadcasts, I watch 1080i and 720p shows. The 1080i ones look great. Honestly I don't think you'd be able to tell a difference on a 720p HDTV between 1080i upconversion and 1080p upconversion.

Whether your TV or DVD player has a better scaler depends on the cost of each and the components. I have the Philips DVP-642 DVD player. To be blunt, it's a cheap piece of crap. It works fine for me though. It only supports component output and no upconversion, so I send component output to my 42" Samsung 1080p HDTV and everything I play on the player, even crummy old VCD, looks fantastic. I am obviously using the TV's native scaler on everything. If it was me, I'd get the Philips and have Divx playback.

[Krispy Kritter]

If you check the specs on the players, you will see multiple output formats. The number you are referencing is the highest upconversion, they also support 480i,480p, and 720p. The best picture will be achieved by upconverting with the best chipset. The only way to know which is better (DVD player or TV) is to experiment and try both. You also don't want to input a signal higher than your TV supports. Since your TV only supports 720p, then a 1080 signal gets downconverted by the TV. No point in using the good upscaler in the DVD player to ouput 1080i/p and then have the TV use it's not so good scaler to reduce the image.

[jagabo]

It gets even more complicated. Most 720p HDTVs don't have 1280x720 displays and no overscan. So the signal they get is going to be resized again before being displayed. For example, 720p LCDs often have a native resolution 1366x768. Whatever signal is received gets resized to about 1440x810 then the central 1366x768 pixels is sent to the LCD.

As has been pointed out, the only way to know which works best is to try out all the possibilities.