ASDA £30 Upscaling DVD player

[d.boyd1uk]

OK, I have a 40" HD LCD screen arriving Thursday, Hoepfully!

I currently have a pioneer DV-444 DVD player, would the £30 ASDA player be better than the pioneer, the pioneer is many moons old now, just considering a purchase that is all, not intrested in any other HD DVD player, £30 sounds good to me as long as it is an improvement on the pioneer.

[thescrounger]

Hard to say without more information.

[d.boyd1uk]

http://www.pioneer.co.uk/uk/products/archive/DV-444-K/index.html

[thescrounger]

I was thinking more of the new screen and the asda player. :D

[rwniel]

How good can the upscaler be in a £30 dvd player? It will probably benefit from the use of a different connection though, as I notice the Pioneer only has scart and s-video; rgb scart could well be comparable though if the cable is a decent one, so it's hard to say.

Robert

[thescrounger]

Yeah, you could probably use a better connection than a scart, but a £30 upscaling player is unlikely to be better at scaling than a good quality screen, unless the asda player is rebranded and has some reasonable kit inside. It's probably worth getting a new player, but something in the £60 - £100 price range.

[d.boyd1uk]

talking about here
http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=533419&highlight=asda

[thescrounger]

Well it hasn't got very good reviews from that thread.

"for anyone contemplating it, don't bother.
The PQ via HDMI is terrible, IMO.
Edge enhancement is improved, but that's it.
In fact it's decidedly blurry, with the "Matrix", which surprised me.
To be fair "Black Hawk down" seemed ok, but not noticably better
"

I'd put the £30 toward something decent.

[d.boyd1uk]

ok, will probably look for a hd dvd player, possibly xbox360 player

cheers

[homerjhandley]

the 360 can upscale via VGA to 720, so would this be a better picture than using my philips DVD that uses component and probably 420 and the TV does the rest?

[d.boyd1uk]

the 360 can upscale via VGA to 720, so would this be a better picture than using my philips DVD that uses component and probably 420 and the TV does the rest?


Some quotes from av forums, from same thread.


Unless you are using the xbox 360 hd dvd player there is absolutely no upscaling advantage offered to the 360 console by using a VGA cable . The console itself will upscale to 560p ( I think) with sdvd . If component looks better just use that ( You can get 1080i through component using the Hddvd drive )

Incorrect. The VGA cable will allow the upscaling of standard DVD's up to 1080p depending on what resolutions the TV can handle.


I have a 360 and the A700 and concur that Component looks loads better on my setup than VGA even with the Dynamic settings. Forget about upscaling it's a nonsense really (unless using a dedicated VP) as the PJ will up/downscale everything to 1280x720p natively anyway.