Bought my HDTV last month and whilst looking round my local Comet, I saw a nice looking Samsung DVD recorder. I am currently running my sony dvp-ns52p through components into my HDTV and the picture is amazing. Would the picture quality be any better if I bought the samsung dvd-r136 that I have seen and connect it to my HDTV via a HDMI cable? The samsung dvd recorder supports upscaling, but there must be a limit to the picture quality from a standard DVD disc?

Basically, would it be best to keep the sony running through component cable or to buy the samsung and run through HDMI? I have got sky HD on order and the tv only has one HDMI connector, so the dvd recorder will have to come out of the HDMI connector when it arrives anyway? Advice??

Upscaling is the chip in the player/TV taking best guesses at what the data would be if it was there. Sometimes it will look better, and sometimes it will look worse.

I would save your money personally.

Bought my HDTV last month and whilst looking round my local Comet' date=' I saw a nice looking Samsung DVD recorder. I am currently running my sony dvp-ns52p through components into my HDTV and the picture is amazing. Would the picture quality be any better if I bought the samsung dvd-r136 that I have seen and connect it to my HDTV via a HDMI cable? The samsung dvd recorder supports upscaling, but there must be a limit to the picture quality from a standard DVD disc?

Basically, would it be best to keep the sony running through component cable or to buy the samsung and run through HDMI? I have got sky HD on order and the tv only has one HDMI connector, so the dvd recorder will have to come out of the HDMI connector when it arrives anyway? Advice??[/quote']

I presume you mean the Sky HD will have to use the HDMI connector when it arrives.

You can get get HDMI switchers that allow you connect more than one HDMI source to your TV.

Normal DVDs are 720*576 and HD TVs are at least 1280*720 so your picture will need to be upscaled either way.

It's just a choice of letting the TV do it when fed via SCART or getting a DVD player that can do it for you and feed the TV by one of the other inputs.

Personally I'd just leave the TV to do it and keep the HDMI and component inputs free for proper HD sources

I have the samsung hd850 upscalling dvd player you can get it for a £100 and its upscales very well to my projector, dvds look much sharper and clearer upscaled, i chose the samsung as it can be made multiregion via and hanset hack and also sometimes if you have an earlier model this hack allows you to upscale via component which i needed to feed my projector, it comes with a hdmicable in the box as normally you can only upscale via hdmi

Thaks for your help. I think I'll wait for dual standard HD recorders (blu-ray & HD DVD) to be available. As I said before, my current set-up is fantastic and I dont think the £190 would be worth-while.

i have a samsung Hd-DVD player(i same as the bloke above i think) and it is a better picture

does your TV have a VGA input? if so you can get hdmi>vga adapters

thats how i am running both a hdmi dvd player and my x-box 360 as HD

Fluffy you considered building or buying a HTCP ? This way you can add and remove Blu-Ray / HD DVD drives as you wish. Bit more money initially but very expanable, plus you can drive you panel / TV via HDMI to whatever resolution you want to.

I am going to build my own HTPC / MCE pc so when Blu-Ray drives and HD DVD drivers comes out I can swap them when I need to, plus I can record and pause live TV and dump it onto DVD etc.

But will your HTPC have HDMI with HDCP :P

But will your HTPC have HDMI with HDCP :P

Yep it will do if you buy the new ATI 6600 card with HDMI supporting HDCP

My point was you have to be careful to pick the right card with HDCP.

As a point of note not all GPU's that support HDCP will produce a card with HDCP. A lot of the more recent GPU's support HDCP and HDMI but require an external chip with the crypto key on it to be placed on the board and wired to the GPU. Many boards have forgone this to save on the cost of this extra chip, to the point that many HDMI cards don't actually support HDCP.

Bit cheeky really to claim it is supported by the GPU when really it will only work if the thing has soe extra devices on board I think :(

What point ? And yes the ATI 6600 does support HDCP without additional hardware.

Thing is this is all superficial as the exact whats and wherefores of HDCP still haven't been finalised same with HDMI it's had 3 reincarnations already and is now on version 1.3.....

The point was that the HDMI cards won't all support HDCP and so you won't be able to playback HDCP locked content in HD. Although thats a mute point.

Yay for specs

I know what you mean about changing specs, but PCIe is still changing and yet people just put a stake in the ground and say yep we will do this then thats where it goes.

Right yes not all HDMI cards support HDCP which will catch people out. PCIe is a bit like AGP and it's changing speeds a year or two ago.

I am holding out for a decent HDMI card which support HDCP which will probably cost an arm and a leg I should imagine but as of yet I am unable to get prices of the ATI 6600 HDMI card.

Trust me you don't want to see the specs for PCIe, pcie hotplug and power saving and ACPI then.

Work requires me to know these and ouch does it hurt reading some of it.