The > Technology > Circuits > State of the Art: For DVD's, a New Definition

HE runaway success of the DVD notwithstanding, its arrival on the electronics scene was poorly timed. Most of the content published by the movie studios is in theater-style wide-screen format. You can watch a movie letterboxed - that is, squished - taking up only about two-thirds of the screen on a 19-inch tube TV, or you can watch it blown up on a giant wide-screen high-definition set.

Sweeter, maybe, but the screen of the HDTV is made up of 720 to 1,080 horizontal lines of resolution, while there are only 480 lines of picture stored on that DVD. Most people don't realize this, but DVD's are far from high-def.

This uncomfortable incongruity between the resolution of DVD's and newer TV's may be one reason that price, rather than quality, is what most people look for in a DVD player. Still, as each generation of player technology has gotten less expensive, a newer technology has emerged to drive up the price of deluxe models.

In the early days, that option was a Dolby Digital surround-sound decoder, which eventually found its way out of players and into audio receivers. The progressive-scan craze hit later, fueled largely by the myth that the feature would improve the quality of a DVD's picture on a standard-definition TV. Now that even the cheapest players in the pack boast progressive scan, a new premium DVD player has emerged, the all-digital HD upconverter, and it can sell for 0 to 0 above average prices.

To avoid compounding any new myths, I want to be blunt. If you don't own or plan to buy an HDTV with a digital-video input, this new type of player isn't worth it. But if you have made the jump to high-def, these new players could be perfect, especially if that new TV didn't cost a bazillion dollars.

What an HD upconverter does sounds promising: it examines the DVD video, digitally enlarging each movie frame to 720 or 1,080 lines of resolution. It then sends the information, still in digital form, to the TV, which displays it as a high-definition signal.

Until upconverters arrived, DVD players turned digital video to analog to send it to the TV (by composite, S-video or component jacks). The high-definition TV would have to change it back to digital data to fit the picture to its screen. Even with costly equipment, something could get lost in the messy conversion. A digital connection between the HD-upconverting DVD player and the TV means that the information on the DVD makes it to the TV in one piece.

It also usually gets there in one wire. Most HDTV's on the market, even ones costing less than ,000, have an HDMI input. HDMI, or High Definition Multimedia Interface, bundles video data with digital audio data, so you get the highest quality picture and sound at once.

TV's dating back a year or two might have a DVI (digital visual interface) input instead. The two formats are compatible - there are even cables with a DVI connector on one end and an HDMI connector on the other - but DVI is video only, so sound has to travel separately.

I tried out five of the latest players from Denon, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba, using three of the most popular flavors of HDTV: a 26-inch Toshiba direct-view tube set, a 42-inch plasma by Hitachi and a 42-inch Sony Grand Wega, a rear-projection TV that uses three liquid-crystal display chips to produce its picture.

Popping in the high-quality Superbit DVD release of Luc Besson's 1994 masterpiece, "The Professional," and watching just one scene - a meditative moment for the evil Stansfield, played by Gary Oldman, before his crew of dirty cops turns an outer-borough apartment into Swiss cheese - I could see a genuine difference between this breed of player and two earlier ones, a Yamaha and a Sony, which I used as benchmarks.

To see exactly what these upconverters were doing, and to help identify the differences between them, I took the advice of Gary Merson, publisher of the HDTV Insider Newsletter (hdtvinsider.com), and located the latest picture-testing disc from Silicon Optix, as well as a copy of "Star Trek: Insurrection," known in the film business as a bad transfer.

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