MovieStuff wrote:carllooper wrote:
MovieStuff wrote:Also, Kent and I seem to be the only ones concerned about radical variations in the upscaling of SD material on HD displays.
Which has nothing to do with the thread question or anything I was doing.
You really believe that?
Roger
I must admit this is a very good question and it took me quite some time to formulate the answer
If you are playing SD content on an HD display then it is being upscaled by the display hardware. Or if I look closely at a computer monitor the image is also being upscaled - on my retina. There are different ways of upscaling the image.
Now no new information is being added by such upscaling algorithms or actions, whether live (by the display hardware) or before hand in digital editing, or in staring closely at pixels in Photoshop. So in terms of new information it doesn't matter which algorithm or method you use, there won't be any new information in the result. But there will be aesthetic variations on how the same SD information is being presented. And these can become a question. Linear filtering, bilinear, trilinear, etc. There are different ways to interpolate the image up to HD, each of which is artificial but give a different effect, so there are reasons to look into these algorithms in terms of which looks better, even if no new information is being presented.
But in terms of the thread question I found these questions (as interesting as they are) did become redundant. Here's what I would argue (the question of belief is irrelevant because if there is a good counter-argument I will be the first to adopt the counter-argument):
If you do an HD scan because it is better than SD upscaling, and your reason for it being better is because it adds new information to the result (which it does), then it doesn't matter what the differences are between upscaling algorithms, because you wouldn't be using any of them.
Now we might ask ourselves what we would do if HD scanning didn't add any new information, but because the question contains a counterfactual proposition it is (or becomes, or always was) an incorrect question. However, what we could ask instead, is what we might do if we didn't know the facts. And that is perfectly valid. Indeed that is where I started. I didn't know the facts so I asked of the world a set of questions that would lead me to a better understanding (hopefully). Now in such circumstances we might just do an HD scan to be on the safe side and leave it at that. The question of facts isn't necessarily answered but we solve some other problem anyway. Or we might do an SD scan because it's cheaper (amongst other perfectly valid reasons). Or we might do what I did, which was to do an HD scan to see what it looks like and if it looks better, ie. contains more information (which it factually does) then we would no longer be in a position of not knowing, and therefore we would no longer be in a position requiring the pursuit of answers to counterfactual questions (other than curiosity of course).
Now my only reservations with regard to the above argument is that it relies on what appears to be a kind of fortutiousness argument - that the counterfactual question turned out to be counterfactual. What if it wasn't counterfactual? But there in is the problem. If you don't know what the facts are then you don't know and, as it seemed to me, whether fortuitious or not, the task was to find out the facts.
Carl
