When Upscaling DVD Players Are Good Enough

  • Article

Tonight I was surfing the guide on my TiVo S3 an noticed Showtime HD has Casino Royale scheduled.  Considering I had just watched half of the movie last weekend on DVD before heading to Phoenix and Las Vegas, I thought it was pretty interesting timing.  So I setup the recording and watched a different movie.  I also set my Dell to record the movie as well.  Keep in mind I am feeding the Dell and TiVo with FIOS TV.

A few minutes ago I started watching the Showtime HD version of the movie.  Much to my dismay, Showtime is showing a chopped version.  By chopped I mean it is zoomed and therefore you cannot see the full theatrical frame.  Why do they do this?  I know why they do it.  They want to fill the screen as opposed to having black bars on the top and bottom. 

I hadn't planned on comparing the DVD to the Showtime HD version, but I was noticing some bad motion on the Showtime version.  Some of the motion stuff I noticed was likely a combination of factors.  The zoomed movie doesn't help such matters.  But I started paying closer attention to the actual picture quality (PQ).

In short, my Sony standard definition upscaling DVD player was doing a pretty remarkable job.  And the standard def DVD player had one thing the Showtime HD version didn't...  the entire picture.  I can understand taking a widescreen movie and chopping it to fit a 4:3 aspect ratio screen, but there is little excuse to chop a 2.35:1 ratio movie for widescreen playback.  Let's not forget Verizon had nothing to do with the cropping of the movie by Showtime.

For a more interesting look into the antics of the cable providers (chopping and compression), see the post at https://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost.php?p=13393488&postcount=1.  This is a great comparison of Comcast to Verizon FIOS TV. 

The HD programming content war is going to happen.  Eventually enough consumers are going to become educated on this stuff and start demanding better quality.  It will be interesting to see what standards of measure can be agreed upon.  If they can be agreed upon.

Until then, buy yourself a good upscaling DVD player for less than $100 and enjoy your current movies because you have no control over what the networks and cable providers do to the content.  No control other than to vote with you dollars by discontinuing service but even that's too extreme for me.