Converting Standard Definition DVDs

"Hi, I'm Brad Bear on behalf of Expert Village. In this title I want to talk a little bit about up conversion of DVDs and what that kind of is. With HD DVD players and Blu-ray players, they automatically take your standard definition disk or content, say a TV show or a movie that you've bought. Your older DVDs, your regular DVDs and they will take those and play those back just like they would their HD or Blu-ray disks that they were designed for. The only difference is they will take that signal and actually make the image larger in the disk. What they do is they double the amount of resolution or the amount of lines that that disk was made with to display optimally on your HD TV set. Now what happens is your standard definition content is at four hundred and eighty lines. And what the conversion does is it doubles those lines, or even triples those lines depending on if it's going to seven hundred and twenty or one thousand eighty lines of resolution for your set. Depending on the set that you've got. And it will up convert those images, send it up to the set so it can be displayed optimally. Your standard definition players, if you just hook a standard definition player, your regular DVD player up to your high definition set, what you might encounter is that the image kind of looks grainy. And the pixels, the little dots that make up the image kind of dance around and the edges are jagged and it doesn't look very good. It's like you bought this great TV and it looked great in the store, doesn't look good when you plug up your standard definition player. Well what happens is your standard definition player which is four hundred and eighty lines, when it sends a signal to your TV, your TV's trying to make it fit the TV itself. So it's just blowing images up. So if you have pixel information, it's just a little block, and it's blown up, you're going to start to see all the imperfections. It's kind of like taking a computer image and just zooming in as far as you can, and all you see are just big blocks of pixels. It's not quite that bad, but it's the same effect. You're just magnifying the image on a standard def player to a HD TV So if you get a HD TV you decide not to go HD DVD, or Blu-ray, you might want to consider the DVD sets that up convert the image for an HD set. You can buy a DVD player that will up convert it, and it's still just a standard def player. So those are some things to consider when also looking at HD DVD, Blu-ray, or if you just want to stick with all your regular DVDs and stick with a standard definition player. At least get one that does the up conversion for your HD DVD set."