Well, I'm not too up on the whole HD scene. I have an HD tv that works the way I need it too. I honestly don't know much about any of it. Now, I have a regular pioneer DVD player that upconverts to a 1080i signal.. If that doesn't sound right, you gotta straighten me out. Anyways, I have a dvd player that upconverts my regular dvd's, which makes my normal dvd's look really good on my HDTV. Now, if i was to get a true HD DVD player, would there be a huge jump in picture quality? Or would I be hard up to find a difference in the quality?

If you got a HD DVD player (1080p) I believe you would notice a big difference under the following circumstances:
-your HDTV is 42"+
-your HDTV is 1080p compatible

Other than that, although there is a difference, I don't think it's a big difference.

Well, I have a 62" 1080i HDTV. My whole thing was, that if I can have regular dvd's upconverted to look this good, I don't want to go a blow $200 on the HD DVD addon for the 360 to have similar picture qualities. My girlfriend would shoot me if i hooked it up and it looked almost the same as my regular dvd player..

Well if your TV does not support 1080p, I'm pretty sure you will see no increase in quality.

PLEASE... that's total BS

The 1080i standard is consistent enough that progressive displays can deinterlace the signal with pretty much no artifacting. it's not like 480i were nearly ever implementation is slightly different. At that point the only difference between 1080i and 1080p is the frame rate and that doesn't mean jack with DVDs because almost all of them are only 28fps anyway.

Standard Widescreen DVD is 720x480 MAXIMUM and some are as low as 640x480 interlaced

Standard HD-DVD is 1920x1080

I run an OPPO upscaling DVD player for my regular DVDs and while it does look fantastic it is in no way shape or form a viable alternative to real HD content.

IMO the REAL question here isn't whether or not HD-DVD will be noticeably better than an upscaled DVD. It's whether or not makaveli91's TV is REALLY a native 1080i TV or if it just "supports" 1080i.

so I ask you, makaveli91, What is the "Native Resolution" of your TV? if you're not entirely confident in your answer you could at least tell us what kind of technology it is (DLP, LCD, CRT, etc.) and or a make/model number.

haha, Honestly I'm not too sure what you mean by native 1080i. SO... My Tv is a 62" DLP Toshiba... I can't think of the model.. I've been drinking a little too much tonight. I'm thinking its an MX 96 or something...


EDIT: I looked at our invoices and whatnot, and its a 62MX196. When i said that i didn't know much about the HD and all that stuff, I really meant that i'm a straight up noob... lol.

Looking up the model number your TV is a native 1080p display. that means the DLP chip is a grid of 1920x1080 pixels. Which is pretty much as good as you can get.

Ideally you'll want to send this TV a 1080p signal over an HDMI cable

the next best thing is 1080i over either an HDMI or Component Video

and after that is 720p over either HDMI or Component video

If you're planning on getting into HD-DVD you'll want to use a player that supports 1080p over HDMI. If you're going to use a 360 and it's not an Elite you wont be able to get HDMI output.

HD-DVDs are encoded in 1080p, if you're using component your TV probably wont be able to receive 1080p over that cable type so you'll be forced to drop it down to 1080i and that causes the Xbox to interlace the signal and then your TV has to deinterlace it before displaying it. Essentially it'd be throwing away half the image data for no good reason.

This really comes down to whether your TV supports 1080p over component or VGA too. Both cable types are capable of 1080p but most TVs (even 1080p TVs) wont accept that signal over anything but HDMI.

honestly you'd be much better off buying a stand-alone player.