[quote name='Kirin Lemon']Well, you can *think* that, but it doesn't mean you're right. This might be a good read for you, or anyone else considering buying these faux-HD discs:
http://kentaifilms.blogspot.com/2009/03/pandoras-ntsc-box-is-opened-further.html[/QUOTE]
That link sounds like it written by a disgruntled PS3 owner and many of the assumptions made in it are inaccurate.
Blu-ray Discs upscaled from 480i can still - and usually do - look
much better than the original DVD.
But, there are a couple of requirements.
A) You need a Blu-ray player other than the PS3 or Panasonic BD30-based player. While a lot of people talk about how great the PS3 is a Blu-ray player, the fact is it can't deinterlace 1080i which is pretty sad considering the huge amount of 1080i material on BD (not just upscaled anime, but also FullHD live events like UFC and concerts). And, while the Panasonic BD30 got a good rep when it came out, it can deinterlace 1080i but does a really crummy job of it. Some players that are good at deinterlacing 1080i include the Pioneer BDP-320 (~$250) and Oppo BDP-83 (~$500). Get one of these instead of the PS3. While the PS3 was a good player when it first came out, ever since release of the Pioneer 51FD there have been much better players in terms of A/V quality available than the PS3 - especially if you watch a lot of 1080i-encoded Blu-ray or DVD in general.
B) The studio has to do the upscale properly. Upscaling from 480i to 1080i is actually not that hard. Bandai Visual/Honneamise has done a fantastic job of it in all cases I've seen, I haven't examined the work of other studios, but I have not seen any botched jobs. So my guess is this one is met in most cases.
Now, why does an upscaled BD look better than the DVD if A) and B) are met?
Three reasons:
A) Low pass filter applied robbing the 480i master of high frequency detail while prepping for encoding in order to make compression for DVD easier. Generally DVDs do not have enough space and/or peak bitrate to handle an unfiltered 480i master in an automated encode w/o artifacting, thus the detail is filtered out to make automated encoding easier since high freq detail is most difficult to encode - hand tweaked encodes are much more expensive to make.
B) The compression itself introducing artifacts. DVD is generally a bit-starved format, meaning you often see macroblocking and other artifacts.
C) Improper progressive flagging of 480i master for DVD encode, which happens all too often.
While a great DVD upscaler like the Oppo/Pioneer BD players can fix C), they can't do much about A & B because the detail is already lost and/or distorted.
Bottom line, so long as you don't own a PS3 or Panasonic BD30-based player, Blu-ray Discs upscaled from 480i masters will look much better than the DVD 99% of the time.
