Samsung LED Series 6 V 7

[oxbose]

Hi there,

Moving house, so have been given the go ahead to completely revamp my kit.

I am considering the move from my beautiful CRT to flat screen tech. I have been blown away with the 40" series 7 Samsung LED. So LED for me is a winner. For approx the same price I can get the Series 6 LED 46". Does anyone know if the picture quality differs between the 2 models? Anyone got a 46" LED from Samsung?

Also, can anyone tell me what video upscaling is.... i.e. if for example i have SKY+ SD injected to my AV receiver, what does this exactly do? Does it make the picture quality better. I cannot find any info on the web.... you know the real tech behind it?

Many thanks Oxbose

 

[ear]

all i know is samsung rules for colours.

 

[Anonymous]

Have had a Samsung UE40B7020 LED backlighter for over a week now and the picture quality is excellent. Really happy with it, colours and upscaling are very good. HD pictures via Blu-ray or Sky are really vivid.

 

[robjcooper]

Video upscaling - let's see if we can get the ball rolling...

Normal standard definition (SD) pictures are recorded with a resolution of 720 x 576 pixels per frame. A full HD picture has a frame resolution of 1920 x 1080. If you displayed the SD picture on an HD screen pixel for pixel (i.e. it's native resolution) you would be watching a small image in the middle of the screen with a very large black border all the way around it. So, in order to fill your lovely new HD screen from an SD source, what the upscaler does by using some clever computational algorithms is to generate new pixels, giving you an image which has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, 414,720 of which are real and 1,658,880 of which are generated by the upscaler.

It's far more complicated than this but i'll try and simplify it a bit: imagine only every other horizontal pixel on every other complete line on your HD screen contains original information from the SD image (It's roughly every second horizontal pixel and not every third as to complicate matters further, HD being a native widescreen format has also got to electronically stretch the SD 720 x 576 anamorphic image to 1024 x 576 to give you the correct aspect ratio so even before it has started upscaling to HD it has already had to generate some new pixels.) The upscaler then has to generate new pixels from the existing ones to fill in all these gaps. To do this it uses the chrominance, luminance and motion/temporal information from each of the existing pixels in the frame as well as the ones surrounding, and also those in the preceeding and following frames to try and calculate what pixel information might be contained within those gaps and then attempt to create new pixels so that the image received by the screen contains 1920 x 1080 pixels rather than the original 720 x 576.

If you fancy a far more technical insight into some of the nuances of the techniques used then there is an excellent article written by the guy behind the best broadcast upscaler/cross up and down converter the Teranex at:

http://hometheater.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=hometheater&cdn=gadgets&tm=2&f=00&tt=13&bt=1&bts=1&zu=http%3A//www.hometheatermag.com/gearworks/1105gearworks/index.html

Ignore the fact that he keeps referring to 720 x 480 as that is the number of SD pixels all those poor NTSC viewers have had for so many years !

When viewed in isolation, the results are quite impressive and do look good on an HD TV. However if you compare them to a true HD image of the same footage, then you can see some of the artifacts which this can generate. I'm sure there'll be a load of replies disagreeing with that, but an upscaled image is not truly HD, only a computer's representation of how an SD picture might have looked if it had been shot in HD.

Hope there was some form of enlightenment in there !

Rob