DIGITAL DREAM

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Let it be known that the driving force behind HDTV monitor sales from day one until now has not been high-definition content. It has been the DVD. The reason is simple: Until recently, there was only a smidgen of HD content available to most of the nation’s viewers. On the other hand, a DVD coupled with an HD monitor was a marriage made in heaven. It allowed the consumer to view a format that was ideally suited for all the attributes of high-definition display devices. DVDs offered widescreen source material with outstanding horizontal resolution—far more detail than any previous source and more than regular televisions were ever engineered to fully handle.

Samsung’s DVD-HD931 DVD player offers a digital visual interface (DVI), which caters to the new era of digital TVs. You can transfer the DVD player’s digital signal directly to the display without any unnecessary signal-degrading digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital conversions.

Until very recently, the best picture that you could feed an HDTV from a DVD player was an analog signal. But this places a limit on DVD performance, because high-definition displays have a native scan rate higher than that of DVD. To match the TV’s higher scan rate, an extra step is required when processing the signal. The DVD’s inherently digital signal needs to be converted to analog at the output of the DVD player, then back to digital form (inside the TV) and sometimes back again to analog (at least on a cathode-ray-tube–based display). Some DVD players can help the situation by feeding a 480-line progressive signal directly into the display, which can create a clearer, less processed, superior image. The progressive signal will still need to be upconverted (albeit less drastically) on TVs that use a higher scan rate, such as 1080i. The extra processing may add artifacts.