AV Receivers?

Question

Ok I see these things can upscale video to HD and audio to 7.1 (was looking at a Sony for around $1,200). So am I correct in saying that (for example) a cheap DVD player pluged in to the composite port can give me HD and 7.1 audio. Like-wise say a Direct TV receiver (non HD) converted to HD. If this is the case whats the point of buying Blu-Ray and Direct TV HD when these things upscale it for you.

There must be pros and cons, but what am I missing here, whats the difference.

Answer 1

Be careful here..

Some receivers up-scale (with questionable quality) and ANOTHER feature is analog-HDMI conversion. These are different.

You only want HDMI conversion. This allows you to run 1 HDMI cable to your TV, but you can feed the receiver with composite/svideo/component/HDMI.

Look into the Onkyo TXSR 605, 705, 805 receivers. These units are starting about $380 and include tons of features so they are winning "Best of the Year" awards from many magazines.

"..whats the point of buying Blu-Ray and Direct TV HD"

You have an HDTV? Your TV automatically up-scales standard def video to HD. Try tuning to a standard def CBS channel, then the HD CBS channel. See a difference?

Standard def - 1940's technology

HD - year 2000 technology

Answer 2

Upscaling has been around for a long time. Like everything else it started out for the super wealthy but trickling down until that technology was affordable to the mass market (in another 10 years it'll be integrated into your iPhone). Now the super wealthy are on to new things like super wide screens and 100" plasmas. As good as upscaling has been it can never equal something originally filmed in 1080P. It would be like shooting a picture with a 1 MegaPixel camer (even less actually) and resizing it to 2 MegaPixel and then blowing that up to your screen size of in some cases 50"+. There is now way it can look as good as something shot with a sharper camera and delivered in that higher resolution.

What a scaler does is look at the image and then make a good guess about what is supposed to be between the lines and draw that in. In the case of composite video it has to draw 2 lines for every line it does have to look at. Yes there are scalers out there that do a very good job with standard definition signals(480i) or enhanced definition signals (480P) but at $3000 for the DVDO iScan it still won't look as good as a $299 Blu-Ray player or a $100 HD Satellite box on HD content. It is mainly for what you can't get already in HD or in the case of the iScan you can further improve (slightly) 1080 images.

The Sony STRDG920 just came out. It will upconvert analog video to HDMI (a convenience feature, not a quality feature) and will play the newer uncompressed audio formats. $599