When is HD not HD?

If you listened to Toshiba last year, you’d have heard the company sing the praises of HD DVD (‘The Look and Sound of Perfect’) and how it would add a new dimension to entertainment. In many ways that was fair enough. The quality of HD DVD is leaps and bounds ahead of DVD and identical to that produced by Blu-ray players, as it uses the same video codecs.
Skip to the start of this year and Toshiba seems to have gone completely mad, reversing its opinion completely. With HD DVD a failed standard and Blu-ray the only HD disc format, Toshiba has decided that, after all, HD isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. So, what’s better than HD, then? Er, DVD.

According to Toshiba, its new upscaling DVD players are all anyone needs. Capable of outputting a 1080p picture, the company would like us to believe that the quality is almost as good as a true HD source. Not only does this make a mockery out of the company’s last few years trying to sell HD DVD, but it’s also complete nonsense.

While we’ll be happy to admit that there’s a difference in quality between different upscaling players, and some do a better job than others, a simple fact that remains: you can’t add detail that isn’t there.

DVDs in the UK have a resolution of 720x576 pixels (414,720 pixels in total); full 1080p HD has a resolution of 1,920x1,080 pixels (2,073,600 pixels in total). This means that an upscaling DVD player has to add 1,658,880 pixels of extra data to make DVD 1080p video. That’s almost four-times the number of pixels from the original source and a hell-of-a-lot of data to be making up.
While an upscaling DVD player can use lots of clever algorithms to make DVD look better on a 1080p screen, no amount of intelligence can add detail. A video panning across a book shelf in DVD might mean that you can’t read any of the titles; with 1080p video you probably could. So, how’s an upscaling DVD player supposed to add this extra detail? Are we expected to believe that the player can detect the books by their cover and put the text on the spines?

The kind of upscaling technology that creates incredible detail from poor-quality original video exists only the realm of TV, where the secret government organisation can get the techy guy to enhance the low-res security camera footage to reveal the face of the killer. If this technology existed in the real world, imagine how much money could be saved: Hollywood could simply shoot all of its films on camera phones and enhance the detail in post-production, and tiny 1-megapixel cameras could be the norm and we’d just need to upscale the image later on a computer.

Total nonsense, of course. Upscaling DVD players can only work with what they’ve got. They can smooth low-resolution video to make it look acceptable on a high definition TV, but that’s it. After all, you can polish a turd, but it doesn’t make it a work of art.