How does Blu-ray player upconverting work?

Darkman asked:

i saw a few Blu-ray players in the store today that said:

Upconverts DVDs to 1080p

Well, if I buy a blu-ray player and it upconverts my old dvds to 1080p, why would I every buy the higher priced blu-ray discs???

Do blu-ray discs go beyond 1080p???

man, sometimes this stuff is confusing.

{ 3 comments }

Crouching Monkey Hidden Hippo: Native 1080p resolution is always better than upconverted. Also blue ray discs are capable of higher audio quality and more channels as well, which regular dvds aren’t even with a blue ray player.
Jerrime W: The point is that upconverting to 1080p is done artificially and not naturally through the blue-ray player’s 1080p decoding process. So, you would probably want something that is naturally done whether than artificially; the process looks better because of the natural occurence done throught the process.

Blue-ray discs are encoded at a maximun scan rate of 1,920 vertical lines and 1,080 horizontal lines of resolution in the better (progressive) scanning process.
Jake: Aside from all the tech talk. Blu-ray upconverts regular DVDs to a more defined picture. In other words it doesn’t really make a regular DVD into 1080p resolution, it only adds artificial lines of resolution to give it a sharper image.

The video, and especially the sound of a Blu-ray movie is unbeatable.