Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater To Blu-ray... Or not to Blu-ray

Here's a data point for you. I just replaced a non-upconverting (480p via component) DVD player with a Sony BDP-S301 BluRay player outputting at 720p over HDMI (so regular DVDs are now upconverted). Display is a 720p native Sanyo Z4 projector with a 95-ish inch screen. I was previously using a component interconnect because the Sanyo projector apparently does a better job upconverting analog inputs than it does with digital inputs.

So...

With an average quality DVD (Sahara) I didn't really notice any difference from the old player.

With a very high quality DVD (I Robot is still one of the best I have seen) I think the image looked a bit better with the upconverting player but I didn't have time for any real A/B testing to be sure.

With a BluRay disk (Casino Royale) there was definitely more detail than any DVD had produced, but with a 720p native display the difference was not as stunning as it is with a 1080 line display. I did not try connecting at 1080i but I would not expect that to be better since the projector would have to downconvert back to 720p for display anyways.

The BDP-S300/301 seems to be getting pretty good firmware upgrades from Sony (haven't tried any yet) but I imagine it would need an HDMI connection to the receiver (or 5.1 analog) in order to get the sound out (ie you can't decode a high-def audio soundtrack and push it across coax/optical as PCM can you ?).

Bottom line : three major benefits :

1. Rather than continuing to buy DVDs I can now buy BDs when the prices are reasonable (which they are sometimes already)

2. Only exceptional DVDs met my "good enough" quality threshold with the projector, while even an average BD is "good enough"

3. Image quality seems to be slightly improved by having the player upconvert rather than the projector, but I imagine that the new Toshiba XD DVD player (or an Oppo 981) might be even better.

Anyways, I'm happy.