With a processor, and a video chip that can process the information and transform it to better resolutions.
If you want good picture but don’t want to spend lots of money, atleast buy a decent cable, & a decent player.
Jase
Billy don’t listen to jleaman, on the HDMI on a normal up converter DVD player, you need to buy a dedicated high-def or Blue ray DVD player, and if you live in Prince Rupert you can see that Zellers only is stocking Blue-Ray.
First it’s a lot of hype about up converters why is that because a standard definition TV and video signals are (480i or 480p) and high def and blue ray are, 720p or 1080i, have you taken a small video of YouTube and watched full screen looks bad right. Well the difference here Billy is that when the signal goes through the up converter it fills those extra lines with data remember a standard DVD has only 480 Lines, so when it goes out to the HDMI to your High-Def TV it’s got 1080 Lines, sometimes it looks good (I have the Samsung HDMI up converter DVD PLAYER, some movies look abit better some don’t, it’s going to look about the same as a normal DVD player.)
I did some reading on this and the more expensive up converters seem to work better Billy but they are not cheap 500.00 or more dollars, so you are better to go with a dedicated High-Def or Bluyray player. I would wait Billy before you buy anything, there is going to be a player that will play both formats. And the price will come down over the next year.
Billy the player you have or want will not play High-Def or Bluyray DVD’s those players are still expensive check out the prices the Samsung BD-P1400 1080p Blue-Ray Disc Player is $379.00 prices go all the way up to 700 dollars.
Upconverting is a rip-off, and you can tell it’s a ripoff by how much salespeople love to say it. It’s one of those words that salespeople like to say (like Firewall and gigahertz). It’s just bullshit, and don’t fall for it.
Basically, your normal TV picture has 480 lines. An upconverter will mathematically make this into 1080 lines for your HD TV. A really cheap upconverter just fills in the missing pixels by looking at the neighbouring ones. A good upconverter uses some cool algorithms to try and guess what the missing pixels should be by looking at the region around the neighbouring ones, not just the neighbours.
Either way, the upconverter is adding pixels that don’t exist – it’s guessing what should be there. You can achieve the same effect by taking a photo that’s 480 pixels high and resizing it in photoshop to 1080 lines. It becomes fuzzy. You have to guess what those extra 600 pixels contain.
It’s much better to start at 1080 lines in the first place, so you don’t have to guess what the missing lines are.
So either get HD or don’t. For 90% of what you watch, you won’t care if it’s 1080 lines or 480 lines. You’re watching the show, you don’t care. If you do care, then get the bluray or HD-DVD version and ignore the upconversion bullshit.
The other scam that salespeople try to get you on is expensive HDMI cables. They’re digital. That means 1s and 0s. It’s either a 1 or a 0. There’s no “better quality” 1 or 0. Expensive cables make sense in the analog world, but in the digital world it doesn’t.
Here’s some examples of upconverting with a photo. Click each photo and zoom in fully to see what I’m talking about.
First one if 480 lines – the standard TV signal (on digital cable, for example).
Second is upconverted from 480 to 1080 using a cheap upconverter. Basically you have to guess what those extra 600 lines should hold.
Third is upconverted from 480 to 1080 using an expensive upconverter. The guess is a bit better, but it’s still crappy.
Fourth photo is a native 1080 image, not upconverted.
Upconverting is a scam, don’t listen to salespeople.
[original attachment deleted after 2 years]
Seriously, if a salesperson says “upconverting” to you, walk away.
If they say “firewall” to you, walk away.
If they say “extended warranty” to you, walk away.
What other words are salespeople bullshit detectors?
More upconverting examples:
[original attachment deleted after 2 years]
extended warrenty?
what about applecare protection plan???
And you are right about the cables
i was in city furniture a couple of weeks back, looking at their AV accessories
and an HDMI cable was over 100
can anybody say commission sales
Did somebody sell you one of those? In a store? If so, just say no!
no
not in a store
but i seem to recall somebody telling me he bought applecare protection plans
[quote=“OMEGA”]but i seem to recall somebody telling me he bought applecare protection plans
[/quote]
I think you’re confusing Futureshop’s commission-based extended warranty, with me recommending you get applecare so that you don’t come to me if your computer breaks.
This is the most UN EDUCATED post i ahve ever seen, MIG you are so full of shit with this comment. YOU are wrong about cables, HOWEVER i do agree cables are expencive and there is a high mark up on them, computer cables are the same.
Now you go to radio shack and buy a rocketfish 4 meter HDMI cable and then you go buy a good brand like Yes expencive Monster cable and I GUARANTEE you will see a difference, there is a huge difference, just becuase it is digital does not mean it does not need to be shielded. IT DOES.
I wish i kept the link to a movie that was on toms hardware, they actually did a test with hdmi cables. Ill research and see if i can find it.
You go buy a cheap cable and run it a few feet and then buy a decent one and then you will see.
I just fixed a customers $40K stereo because he went out and bought a crappy HDMI cable that ran through his wall down and under his house and across then back up to his $6K plazma tv, he was upset and blamed it on the tv, so i showed him you can put in a new tv and have the same problem OR you can buy a properly shielded cable and have it work like the player is right beside it.
Let’s say ( truthfully ) he bought the longer cable, now that being said you don’t need to buy a 100-200$ cable if your player is 1-2 Meters away. Buying a better cables for longer runs DOES make a difference.
As to the RETARD- Astrothug, saying i don’t know what im talking about, i said he could buy a up-converting one so he can save money he did not say he has the money for a Blueray or HD dvd player, HENCE why i suggested a up-converting one.
bluejeanscable.com/articles/hdmi-cables.htm
#4 JUST FOR YOU MIG!!
- “Because HDMI is a digital signal, it doesn’t degrade when run over a long distance like an analog signal does, because it’s just ones and zeros.” Yikes! Not true at all. To explore this issue calls for a bit more detailed discussion.
First, it’s true that if a digital video signal stays intact from one point to another, there’s no degradation of the image. The digital signal itself can degrade, in purely electrical terms, quite a bit over a distance run, but if at the end of that run the bitstream can be fully and correctly reconstituted, it doesn’t matter what degradation the signal suffered–once that information is reconstituted at the receiving end, it’s as good as new.
That’s a big “if,” however. Ideally speaking, digital signals start out as something close to a “square wave,” which is an instantaneous transition from one voltage to another; these transitions signal the beginnings and ends of bits. (In practice, such transitions aren’t strictly possible, and trying to achieve them can generate harmful noise; consequently, high-order harmonics are usually filtered out which results in the wave starting out squarish but not-quite-square.) A square wave, unfortunately, is impossible to convey down any transmission line because it has infinite bandwidth; to convey it accurately, a cable would have to convey all frequencies, out to infinity, all at the same level of loss (“attenuation”). What happens, therefore, in any run of cable is that a digital signal starts out looking relatively nice and somewhat square, and comes out the other end both weaker and rounded-off. The transitions that mark the edges of bits get smoothed and leveled to the point that, far from that ideal square wave, they look like relatively gentle slopes. Portions of the signal lost to impedance mismatch bounce around in the cable and mix with these rounded-off slopes, introducing an unpredictable and irregular component to the signal; crosstalk from the other pairs in the HDMI bundle also contribute uneven and essentially random noise. As a result, what arrives at your display doesn’t look very much like what was sent.
Now, as we’ve said, up to a point, this won’t matter; the bitstream gets accurately reconstituted, and the picture on your display is as good as the HDMI signal can make it. But when it starts to fail, it starts to fail conspicuously and dramatically. The first sign of an HDMI signal failure is digital dropouts–these are colloquially referred to as “sparklies”–where a pixel or two can’t be read. When these “sparklies” are seen, total failure is not far away; if the cable were made ten feet longer, there’s a chance that so little information would get through that there would be no picture on the display at all.
The shame is that, with HDMI, this is prone to happen at rather short lengths. When DVI was first introduced (same encoding scheme, same cable structure, but a different connector from HDMI), it was hard to find cables that were reliable in lengths over 15 feet. The fact that these multipin cables aren’t economical to manufacture in the US and so were being produced exclusively in China, too, didn’t help; Chinese cable manufacturers are very good at keeping costs down, but not the best at keeping tolerances tight. Today, a good HDMI cable can be relatively reliable up to about 50 feet, but because different devices tolerate signal degradation differently, it’s impossible to say categorically that a 50 foot cable will work; it’s only possible to say that it will work with most devices.
Why is that? Well, it all has to do with bad design. The designers of the HDMI standard didn’t really think much about the cable problem, and it shows. This topic is fairly complex in itself, so we’ve split it out into a separate article: What’s the Matter with HDMI Cable?
Analog video signals, contrary to what seems to be the conventional wisdom in home theater circles, are extremely robust over distance. We have run component video for hundreds of feet without observable degradation; the bandwidth of precision video coax, rather than being horribly overtaxed like that of an HDMI cable, is greatly in excess of what’s needed to convey any HD signal. It is true that an analog signal degrades progressively with length; but that degradation, in practice, is so slight and slow that it rarely gives rise to any observable image quality loss in home theater applications.
Yes, Jason, this is true for all kinds of cables, but only really for long distances.
a $10 3-foot HDMI cable is going to have the same 1s and 0s as a $100 3-foot HDMI cable.
This is the bit in your article that matters:
[quote]
Now, as we’ve said, up to a point, this won’t matter; the bitstream gets accurately reconstituted, and the picture on your display is as good as the HDMI signal can make it. But when it starts to fail, it starts to fail conspicuously and dramatically. The first sign of an HDMI signal failure is digital dropouts–these are colloquially referred to as “sparklies”–where a pixel or two can’t be read. When these “sparklies” are seen, total failure is not far away; if the cable were made ten feet longer, there’s a chance that so little information would get through that there would be no picture on the display at all.[/quote]
That’s how digital works – either the 1s and 0s are delivered correctly or they’re not. If they are, then the cheap cable is just as good as the expensive cable.
So yeah, the expensive HDMI cables are a rip-off, because most people don’t run 50 feet with their HDMI cables.
There’s no reason to spend $100 on a 3-foot or 6-foot HDMI cable. Your picture won’t be better.
You even say this yourself:
Yes i agree, a 100$ 3 foot cable, won’t help or do much. you just stated Better HDMI cables are not worth it etc etc, they are in longer runs.
On another note, Upconverting DVD players do suck, BUT for the person that is broke and cant afford a DECENT sony or Toshiba or Pioneer player, then buying that 100$ blue ray is going to be just as bad as the up-converting player.
Some links for you:
gizmodo.com/gadgets/deals/hdmi-c … 180281.php
Tests showed no difference whatsoever betwee a $150 6-foot monster cable and a $6 no-name brand.
gizmodo.com/gadgets/hdmi-cable-b … 268788.php
Test show at most distances (ie: what most people have), there’s no visual difference between cheap cables and expensive ones. Only when you have long distances does it matter.
This isn’t unique to HDMI, it’s the same for any other kind of cable, CAT5, USB, etc.
I should be a salesman. If you can convince people to pay $150 for a 6-foot HDMI cable because “it’s better” then man, there’s a lot of money to be made!
I just think “upconverting” is the danger word that you should look out for. When you’re talking to a salesperson and he says this word, run away.
Seriously, it’s like when a computer salesperson says “firewall.” They just like saying those words, and they know you don’t know what they mean (the salesperson may not even know what they mean), but it sounds like something you should have!
I know somebody who didn’t buy a dual-format (HD-DVD & Blu-Ray) DVD player, but rather bought a standard-def DVD player just because the salesperson said that upconverting was better.
Say it to yourself a few times. Upconverting… upconverting… upconverting. Firewall… firewall… firewall… salsa… salsa… salsa… java… java… java…
It’s all bullshit.
You NEED a firewall !!!
Why someone could… ping … you without one!
I’ve checked around and East Wind Emporium has the cheapest HDMI cables.
$35 for a 10’
Rocketfish 
lol.