Now that the SkyHD box has eventually arrived and been installed, even my wife has noticed & commented the stunning picture quality.It may be sad but the regular picture looks dull and unfocused, in comparison.

Will we be able to see similar quality from our DVD's via DVD5 with scaler?

Likely timescale??

Geoff,

A scaler does not improve the quality of the source it simply attempts to match the resolution to that of the display in the least damaging way possible. An analogy is a pre-amp which attempts to do it's function with the least degradation to the incoming signal.

My pet hate at the moment is the way people go on about 'upscaling' DVD players as if the word 'upscaling' implied some magical transformation of normal definition DVD into a higher resolution format. It doesn't. You may see a benefit if the scaler inside the DVD player does a better job than the scaler inside your display but it's not guaranteed. In fact, chances are with a cheap upscaling DVD player it's using much the same chip as in the display and you've simply been conned by marketing BS.

Allan

Perhaps, it is a misundertnding on my part. But, I had thought that the DVD5 is optimised for the resolution of current standard TVs ie not the 1080 lines of HD and that a scaler would be offered/required at some stage to ensure the DVD5's output optimised the HD screen resolution?

Geoff

Kind of.....
All DVD players are optimised for the actual resolution on the disc itself, which is nowhere near as much as an HD Ready flat panel display.

If you want your 16:9 widescreen discs to fill your 16:9 screen then the picture content must be upscaled.

The scaler in most flat panels is pretty cruddy in order to avoid upping the cost of the TV.
More expensive offboard scalers simply do the job better in the same way that a better preamp stands less in the way of the music (as per Allan's example).

You already have a scaler in your TV.
If your scaler does a rubbish job, and you watch enough dvds then you need to improve on it.
You can do this in one of three ways....

Buy an external scaler to run all your non HD sources through.

Wait for the DVD5 scaler.

Buy a better screen with a really good scaler in it.


None of these will make your dvds look HD, but all of them will remove the obstacle of a poor quality scaler which may well be affecting your DVD5's picture output at the moment.

Hope that helps

Mike

Will the scaler card be a factory or dealer fit?

Almost certainly!


But seriously, dunno!