LCD and plasma TVs have a problem: if the movie isn’t being played on the TV native resolution, you will have really bad image quality. This same problem happens with LCD monitors, for example. If you configure your PC to use a video resolution lower than your LCD monitor native resolution – usually the maximum resolution your monitor accepts – the image will be blurred. If you have a LCD monitor try decreasing the video resolution to see what happens and understand this concept.

So we have a problem with TV channels transmitted at a lower resolution than our TV native resolution and DVD movies, as their original resolution is 480i, a.k.a. SDTV. To solve this issue the latest DVD players and both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players feature an “upconversion” or “upscale” feature, which converts the original DVD signal to HD resolution, up to 1080p. All HD TVs also have this feature, tailored to convert channels that are being transmitted with a resolution lower than your TV’s into your TV native resolution.

To keep the cost of these units low, manufacturers use cheap video processors in their units, which do not provide the best quality possible. In fact, one of the main reasons one TV is more expensive than another with the same screen size is the quality of the video processor used. The same idea goes to players.

So we were curious to see the quality of the upscaler used on Panasonic DVD-S53. To check this we compared the image with the scaler disabled (selecting 480i resolution on the player) with the scaler enabled (selecting 1080p resolution on the player). After that we compared the image generated by the embedded scaler with the image generated by an iScan VP20 external scaler. This device is also known by other names, like external video processor, line doubler or de-interlacer. This unit has the same goal of the internal scaler found on players with an embedded upscaler, but it provides, at least in theory, a better image quality, as it uses a high-end processor. In order to get the best quality from our external scaler we configured the player to send the movie on its original resolution (480i) to it, so all upscaling processing was done by the iScan VP20.

Even though with the embedded upscaler your movies will play at a far better quality compared to playing them at their original resolution, the upscaler quality isn’t the best we’ve seen around. With our external upscaler the image quality was far better and we also could get a better image quality when playing DVDs on other units – like the Sony BDP-S300 Blu-Ray player –, with their upscaler enable, naturally.

We tried to take some pictures to show you the difference in quality but unfortunately with static images you can’t see much of a difference: the main difference was on action scenes. So you have to trust us on that.

Also don’t forget that you need to manually configure the upscaler, and the access to this configuration is hidden:  you need to hit four times the “function” key on the remote control.