A Question about upconverters and what DVDs to purchase

[FFPOLLARD]

I recently purchased a home theater, Samsung 46 HDTV 1080P 10,000:1 Contrast HDMI CABLES ONLY hooked to a Onkyo Receiver and Onkyo DVD Up-converter. When playing some dvd's I notice it displays 480 conversion and the picture looks bad, and other movies upconvert to 720 and looks great....What kind of dvds should I purchase? Anything special? Will an HD DVD work?
My system looks and sounds awesome with the HD sat cable, but I want the same or close to the same with dvds..
Help..........

JP[/b]

[Krispy Kritter]

Depends on what you mean by what kind of dvds you should be purchasing. Any commercial DVD's should be playing back fine. You need to experiment with all of your hardware to see which works better at upconverting. You could be performing the upconversion in the DVD player, possibly the receiver, or with the TV itself. You may be able to see differences between all of them. The TV likely has the better hardware for upconverting, buy only by experimenting/testing will you know for sure.

[filmboss80]

...And make sure the DVD movies you buy are the Widescreen versions.

[jman98]

Your Samsung TV, it it is really 1080p, will show EVERYTHING in 1080p. Everything means everything. If it gets a 480 signal, the TV will upconvert it. You don't HAVE to have the DVD player upconvert. I have a 1 and a half year old Samsung LCD HDTV that displays everything in 1080p and one of my inputs is via component to an older DVD player that can't output anything above 480p. I'm getting excellent results even from it.

I have a Toshiba HD DVD player and it sometimes refuses to output anything above 480p for commercial DVDs. My only connection from the player to the TV is via HDMI. So I have definitely seen this behavior too. I got seriously abused here by one guy for supposedly "not knowing what I am talking about", but he finally suggested that perhaps the Samsung HDTV doesn't correctly implement HDMI. It may be a defect in their entire model line in how they implement HDMI. Not sure, but it definitely does exist. Anyway, Samsung HDTVs excell at upconverting. Your statement that your 480 videos look bad is very surprising to me. This is not typical of Samsung. In fact, Samsung HDTVs are so good at upconverting that they do a better job of it than most DVD players on the market.

HD DVD won't work in any Onkyo DVD player. HD DVD is a dead format now. Toshiba abandoned it and the last new releases are due out in May.
If you want high def DVD, you have to go BluRay now.

Your reference to 720 video is surprising too. Why is your DVD player set to output that when if your TV is really 1080p, it's native resolution will be 1080p? If you are sending it 720 or 480 video, the TV will upconvert both of those to 1080p. Upconverting on the DVD player to 720p and then having the TV do 1080p is not a great idea, unless your DVD player can only output 720p. Perhaps the fault is with your DVD player and maybe it's 480 display is poor. Check to be sure that your DVD player is sending 480p and NOT 480i output (look in the setup) to the TV.

No need for special DVDs per se, but many of the Hollywood special effects blockbusters like Transformers look great on HDTVs, even when upconverted.