At 7:10 PM -0500 1/12/07, Manfredi, Albert E wrote:
Instead, the difference was like this is not TV anymore. This is more like a good movie source. Subjectively, it's like going from looking at a butter knife to looking at a razor blade.
DVDs ARE good movie source, oversampled from high resolution source and encoded as component, progressive scan frames. Take away all of the legacy crap and the underlying images are very good.
Back in the '80s, when i was was beginning to understand the issues related to various forms of image encoding and display, I created an image I called the Composite video footprint. The difference between this, and a raster that was not filtered for interlace, displayed on a progressive scan CRT was dramatic. See attached.
And this image did not show the losses associated with composite video encoding. The ability to process and distribute component video was a huge breakthrough, first made obvious by Sony's Betacam, which used analog component processing. This "finally" became available to consumers with DVDs, which made it possible to eliminate both the composite video footprint, and to a lesser extent, the interlace footprint.
If one were to take any of the HD formats and resample to 576P, then encode using MPEG-2 or H.264, the difference between the downsampled version and an HD encoding would be nearly impossible to detect on most of the HD capable displays shipped to date. In fact, the downsampled version might look better at 10 Mbps than the HD version due to quantization of the HD source.
Regards Craig