detail information

Writing in picture

One thing that is quite tricky to upscale is writing and when small writing is enlarged, it often becomes grainy or rather distorted.  It is a bit like trying to enlarge a non true-type font in a word processing document.  First of all, let's have a look at the image when outputted via SVHS:

As you shown above, the writing and particularly the person's glasses look rather pixellated when the snapshot is zoomed into.  This not as noticeable on a small picture such as from a 21" TV, however when blown up to 88", this becomes really noticeable. 

Now, let's see what component 720p can do:

While the pixilation appears to be eliminated in the live picture, unfortunately once we pause the DVD to take a snapshot, the pixelisation becomes clearly visible, although not as bad as with in the SVHS picture.  In fact, most of the pixelisation in the word 'Supervisor' is eliminated in the component picture.

Now, on to component 1080i:

Again, while the live image looks to free of pixelisation, this still shows up in the paused picture.  In this case, the pixelisation seems to be worse in 'Supervisor' than in the component 720p picture.

The next image shows the output over HDMI at 720p:

From what we can see, there is virtually no difference between the upscaled HDMI and component images at 720p and when playing, the pixelisation effect seems to completely disappear. 

Finally, the same frame via HDMI at 1080i:

Again, like the HDMI 720p snapshot above, we are unable to make out any difference between the HDMI 1080i and component 1080i outputs. 

The following table shows a thumbnail of the five images together:

Black & White Print

Finally, let us see how the upscaling process performs on plain black & white writing.  In this case, we have just coupled the images together to give a better comparison. 

The main difference we notice between SVHS and the upscaled is that the writing looks more natural in the upscaled images.  This is also one of the few cases where we notice any difference between the 720p and 1080i modes.  In the SVHS mode, we can see that the projector itself has managed to remove the pixelisation effect itself, but with the side effect of making the 'greatest hits' writing bold looking.  The word 'night' on the other hand looked grainy on screen using the SVHS output.  Both the Component and HDMI 720p modes do a very good job at clearing up the text, even with the image paused.  While not noticeable in the above screenshot, there was a very faint shadowing effect in the component picture.

Finally, the 1080i modes did a slight bit better at smoothing out the text, especially with the word 'night', making it look like this is coming from a high definition source rather than an upscaled source.

Hayshed straw

When it came to a scene where it showed a hayshed with dogs in the Cats & Dogs movie, this was the one case where we actually seen the upscaling seem to do a worse job than what SVHS outputs.  Due to how little straw it showed during a fairly still scene, we have zoomed in very close to one section of the straw, thus the reason behind why all of the images below are not clear. 

While the SVHS image is not that clear due to how close we zoomed in, it is the only image where the straw is most visible.  In fact, the upscaled images make it look yarn or some type of material as if we took a close-up shot of a piece of carpet!