Well, I was really interested in this until I went back and read that it was a DLP screen. No serious gamer would use a RPTV, especially for their PC monitor. In reply to: "If you're a gamer, you want this monitor"
January 11, 2008
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Oh, and by the way. I wasn't saying you need to go out and buy a CRT or use your old CRT. I have a plasma. I'm just saying, if you have an up-scaling dvd player, just set it to 480p output and leave it. In reply to: "Get an upconverting DVD player for $34.99 shipped"
January 2, 2008
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You are correct. See my comment from earlier. "Up-converting" DVD-players are the industries biggest scam. In reply to: "Get an upconverting DVD player for $34.99 shipped"
January 2, 2008
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Up-scaling or up-converting DVD players are the biggest scam in the industry. They are the world's largest con and noone even questions it.
Let's think about the logic here. You say that an up-scaling dvd-player uses some "pixel-scaling wizardry" to convert a 480 source to 720 or 1080 . What do you think your TV does? That's right, the exact same thing. It uses some "pixel-scaling wizardry" to make a 480 source fit the screen, just like these fancy shmancy up-scaling dvd players. If your TV didn't upscale a 480 source, the video would only fill roughly a 3rd or 4th of the screen. Your TV upscales EVERYTHING you give it, that's what they do. Why do you need a DVD-player to do it? This goes double if you have a CRT. A CRT is literally able to change it's resolution, so there is absolutely no need to upscale.
Using a very sophisticated piece of test equipment (my eyes) I can tell you that up-scaling DVD players are useless. For my money, I trust my TV to upscale the image to it's native resolution more than a $30 to $80 dvd player. I've set my up-scaling dvd player to 480, 720, and 1080 outputs and I can tell you the 480 looks best. I tested on bright and dark scenes on several movies. In fact, 1080 has some terrible artifacts. Obviously performance will differ among dvd players, but I still trust a $2000 TV to do it before a cheap dvd player.
The only thing you want to look for in a dvd player is if it has the outputs you need (HDMI) and supports DTS output and crap like that. This whole up-scaling crap is a big scam. In fact, I can't even believe a tech site doesn't bring this fact to light. CNET is just perpetuating the problem.
I especially love this line from this artible: "which makes all your standard DVDs look a helluva lot better courtesy of some pixel-scaling wizardry." Don't believe this, no "up-scaling" dvd player is going to make any DVD look any better than on a good old fashioned CRT. Playing the DVD on it's native resolution of 480 on a CRT is going to be your best bet. The best you can hope for on a fixed pixel display (plasma, LCD, DLP, etc.) is that your bought a good TV and it handles 480 sources well. If a movie looks like crap on 480 on your brand new plasma, "up-scaling" it to 1080 isn't going to make it look any better.
In reply to: "Get an upconverting DVD player for $34.99 shipped"
January 2, 2008