Upconverting DVD Players

One of the questions people often ask when they get their brand new HDTVs is whether they need to upgrade their DVD players.  After all, if you open your Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Circuit City, etc. catalog you will see many DVD players all talking about upconverting to 1080i or something else.  But the question, are they worth it?

My answer: it completely depends, in large part depending on the quality of your set and your current DVD player.  In my case, an upconverting player make a huge difference in the picture quality.  My Westinghouse does  a great job displaying whatever I give it – but it does not do a good job processing video.  So the artifacts and motion blur that come with interlaced output are really easy to notice and really annoying.  With my original DVD player (which offered regular progressive scan video) the image quality was noticeable less and the colors just not right.  So switching to a player that offered a digital input plus handled all the video processing (all the way to 1080p) was a major improvement.

So will it help you?  Many people find that if nothing else, the switch to a digital input rather than analog offers some improvement, but nothing beyond that is really noticeable.  My advice would be pick up an upconverting player and try it out – nothing else will really be able to tell you whether you’ll find an improvement or not.