Modern TV better at upscaling than modern AV receiver?

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I've just taken delivery of a Panasonic PX55-VT30 (excellent piece of kit BTW) and I might be in the market for a new receiver as an upgrade from my Onkyo 607.

Question is, if I buy a new receiver, should the upscaler be part of my buying decision, or will the VT30 have a better upscaler than a new receiver in the ~£1000 range?
 
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Anonymous

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Upscaling for me has been nothing but a tale of woe. I sincerely hope that I'm the exception here, and that I have simply been looking at the extreme bottom-end of upscaling technology. But from my talks with dealers, I've given up hope for in-receiver upscaling; either you do it at the source, or not at all (unless you want to spend thousands of euros on a dedicated upscaler).

Simply put: I have not yet come across an upscaler in an AV receiver that could do what I wanted. It's not even about picture quality, it's about features. Upscalers in receivers are either ugly (stretch the picture to fill the screen) or stupid (center the picture without zooming). In the former case everyone appears massively obese (at least for regular 4:3 content, which is still prevalent around here), in the latter case you'd be looking at at 27" picture on the center of your 40" TV. This gets even funnier when an original broadcast has black bars: modern TVs are capable of detecting these bars and resizing the picture accordingly, but the upscalers cannot. And most TVs have a feature called "aspect zoom" where the picture width/height ratio is retained, but upscalers cannot.

As for upscaling in the TV: why? Surely a TV has to resize the image so it fits on the screen anyway, so why pretend-convert the picture to 1080p when you can just as well just as well do the resizing based on the original input? It seems completely unnecessary (to me) to do upscaling in your TV.

/rant
 

The_Lhc

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tremon said:
As for upscaling in the TV: why? Surely a TV has to resize the image so it fits on the screen anyway,

Err, dude, that's what upscaling IS! If you don't do it before the TV the TV has to do it, otherwise you get the picture in a small box in the middle of the screen.

so why pretend-convert the picture to 1080p when you can just as well just as well do the resizing based on the original input? It seems completely unnecessary (to me) to do upscaling in your TV.

Converting it to xxxxP is not upscaling, that's deinterlacing, which is an entirely different question.

Why upscale in the TV? Well, in the case of my TV because it does a damn sight better job of it than my SkyHD box does!
 
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The_Lhc said:
tremon said:
As for upscaling in the TV: why? Surely a TV has to resize the image so it fits on the screen anyway,

Err, dude, that's what upscaling IS! If you don't do it before the TV the TV has to do it, otherwise you get the picture in a small box in the middle of the screen.
Ok, fair enough. My point was that in the case of a 576i signal, I don't care whether the TV converts it to 1080p before displaying, or whether it does it in the process of displaying it.
 

The_Lhc

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tremon said:
My point was that in the case of a 576i signal, I don't care whether the TV converts it to 1080p before displaying, or whether it does it in the process of displaying it.

Err, that's the same thing but yes, I shouldn't think anyone really cares, as long as it actually does it, my point was if no other device does the upscaling the TV MUST do it, you don't have any choice and if the TV does it better than the other devices then that's the place to do it.
 
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tremon said: "Upscaling for me has been nothing but a tale of woe."

Whereas for me I've had an excellent experience. The upshift in picture quality when my Onkyo 607 receiver converted DVD 576i to 1080p compared with the TV was very significant, and simply involved plugging the receiver in between the player and the screen.

tremon also said: "My point was that in the case of a 576i signal, I don't care whether the TV converts it to 1080p before displaying, or whether it does it in the process of displaying it."

As has been said, it's the same thing. Something somewhere needs to convert the 576i signal recorded on the DVD to a 1080p image that the screen will display, otherwise you get a postage stamp. In this process about 3/4 of the information displayable by the screen doesn't exist in the source data, so something has to "invent" this extra information. The quality of the processing involved in this inventive step is what dictates the final image quality.

The player could do this, or an AV receiver, or the TV. Essentially the first one in the chain will do it, unless told not to. In my setup all 3 devices have got upscaling built in, I will need to test which one does the "best" upscaling but my question was whether a potentially new AV receiver could outperform the upscaler in my TV (which I suspect may now be the best one in my rig).
 

The_Lhc

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Excalibrates said:
but my question was whether a potentially new AV receiver could outperform the upscaler in my TV (which I suspect may now be the best one in my rig).

Unfortunately it's one of those things that you'll need to test, receivers in that price range should have a decent stab at it but whether they do it better than the TV is impossible to know without trying it. Some of the new Onkyo's support 4k2k upscaling, so you'd hope they'd do 1080 pretty well.
 

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