Up-scaling blue ray players

I recently bought a blue ray player (Sony) and the thing that surprised me most was its ability to upscale a standard DVD to something close to a blue ray disk.

Obviously the TV has a bearing on the overall picture quality and naturally the larger the TV the more diminished will be the effect. Equally, a full HD TV will show better results that an HD ready TV, but here are my general findings.

The TV is a full HD Samsung LCD 40 inch flat screen. It got good reviews, but was not too pricey.

Using this TV with a regular DVD player the image is good, but clearly falls a long way short of blue ray standards.

However, when up-scaling the DVD disks through the blue ray player the quality is markedly improved. So much so that with certain DVD’s, e.g. Lord of the Rings, the difference between blue ray and DVD is hardly noticeable.

Naturally the quality of both the DVD and Blue Ray disk production has a bearing on image quality and there are many “so called” blue ray disks out there that are simply up-scaled in production rather than filmed in HD.

I have “David Attenborough’s” Planet Earth series in blue ray which, despite being described a “must get disk” in blue ray, clearly has segments which are not fully HD. Equally, the last Indiana Jones DVD up-scales to a level which is almost impossible to distinguish from blue ray. Clearly production values have almost as much to do with image quality as format does.

All of that said, if someone asked me if buying a blue ray player was worth the extra expense I would say yes in an instant. Even if you intend to continue using DVD disks the benefits are unmistakable.