Merits of buying a third party external scaler

Judging by the quality of the scalers built in to displays, projectors, and DVD players I should think so. Even the best built-in scalers are adequate at best, poor at worst, hardly suprising as they consist of a "scaler-on-a-chip". Probably the best known of these is the faroudja chipset such as the one in my own Infocus projector. Not bad at all considering what it has to do and better than other similar devices I've seen but with much scope for improvement. A big screen really shows up scaler limitations.

This is why we are developing a proper hardware scaler solution for the DVD5 and n-Vi...

Richard

Better scaling and to get 1:1 pixel mapping.

If your display does not have exactly 1280x720 or 1920x1080 pixels then there will still be scaling going on inside your TV when the DVD player output 1080p. Most external scalers can be set to output any resolution. The idea is to set the scaler to output the exact resolution of your screen, not just the standard 1280x720 or 1920x1080 resolutions. In doing this and then calibrating your screen by adjusting the Horizontal & Vertical size whilst diplaying test patterns you can get the scaler matching pixel for pixel every pixel on your screen. When this is done the picture will snap into focus and the picture will be sharpe. It's a little bit like trying to run a 1280x1024 LCD screen at 1024x768, yes it will work, but it will not be as sharpe as when you drive it at it's native resolution.

Granted a dedicated scaler (be it external or the long awaited Naim scaler card) will do a better job than a built-in one chip design inside DVD players and projectors. But with pending release of new Blu-ray machines just around the corner, is it still necessary/worthwhile to invest in (1) an external scaler since Blu-ray is capable to output at 1080p (2) if it is worthwhile, then my earlier question of investing in a third party standalone scaler such as Cinemateq vs buying a projector that invariably will come package with its own external scaler. The real question: Is it a trend now for all 1080p projectors to be packaged with its own dedicated external scaler, e.g.JVC-HD10, Projectiondesign Action Model three 1080 to name a few.

My LCD max. resolution is 1366 x 768 so how does it work with a rescaling process of 1080P from my DVD player?

Tuan,

if your DVD player outputs at 1080p then the scaler in your screen will then have to down-scale that to 768p. Unfortunately that means that no matter how wonderful the scaler in your DVD player it will be hamstrung by the scaler in your screen.

Better would be for your DVD player to output at 768p to match your display.

Thank you, Richard.