Home cinema advice: What is upscaling and how do you use it?

In the field of home cinema, there are a lot of terms that most of us don’t mean much. For example, what is upscaling? Probably the answer will be something like; “Something that improves picture quality”. That is indeed the simplest description you can give, but of course there is more to it. In this article we look at exactly what upscaling is and how you can use it optimally.

Yet it is not all that simple. Basically the definition of upscaling is: digitally manipulating the resolution of the content to display it in a higher resolution. This sounds good, but it is not always. Upscaling can be done by various devices in your home cinema system, which we will discuss later, and probably not all of these devices have high-quality upscaling chips. The quality of the ‘scaled up’ material depends on the quality of the device and the chip it contains.

Upscaling

Upscaling is a tricky process in which content that contains one lower resolution than the display it is displayed on is manipulated to use the full number of pixels of the display. For example, a Full HD TV consists of a resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels. Actually; 1,920 rows horizontally by 1,080 rows vertically. 19.20 times 1,080 gives a total of 2,073,600 pixels. If you now want to display content with an originally lower resolution on your TV, the upscaling process starts. Content with an SD resolution(720 by 576 pixels) would only fill the screen halfway. The function that ensures that all pixels of the Full HD display are used is the upscaling function. The quality of this is determined by the so-called upscaler, the chip that calculates the extra pixels required.

Downscaling

There is also such a thing as downscaling, which is basically done by the same chip. You probably won’t be using this feature as this was especially true when Full HD wasn’t fully deployed. A few years ago there were a number of different resolutions that ensure that the display on which you wanted to display the content had a lower resolution than the content, for example Full HD content on an HD-Ready TV. Downscaling occurs when the resolution has to be reduced to fit the display. You will then not see Full HD because your TV can only handle an HD-Ready resolution.

How do you use upscaling

As indicated above, there are various devices in your home cinema system that contain the upscaling function. Your Full HD TV probably has one, but also your receiver and your Blu-ray or DVD player. There is a lot of difference in the quality of these upscalers and in general the upscaler in the TV is the least good. If you want a good upscaler, you usually end up with the more expensive Blu-ray or DVD players and / or receivers. How do you find out which upscaler is best? Very simple; trying out.

For example, make sure that this function is switched off on your receiver and Blu-ray player and let the TV do the work. Then try to use the Blu-ray player as an upscaler and compare it. Now you may think; but then the upscaler in the TV also participates? No, in principle not. When content is supplied in the native resolution (Full HD in this case of the TV, the upscaler will not interfere with anything. The same applies to a receiver and a Blu-ray player; if the resolution is already Full HD, it will no longer be digital manipulated by the upscaler.

When you use the TV or projector as an upscaler, you don’t have to worry about anything anymore. The TV ensures that all material that appears on it is converted to the correct resolution. The disadvantage is that this may be of lesser quality. A Blu-ray or DVD player can give you much better quality, but can, of course, only upscale Blu-ray or DVD content to the correct resolution. For other material you are still dependent on the TV. A receiver offers a total solution. All the sources that you connect to this can be converted to the correct resolution.

Do not expect a beautiful Full HD image

Now that you have read all this, you naturally want to see whether your image can be improved a lot. Still, you shouldn’t expect miracles. Do not forget that SD (standard definition) material consists of over 400,000 pixels and that all of this must be calculated to Full HD (more than 2 million pixels). A lot of computing power is required for this and this will not always go smoothly. Especially with fast moving images, you can often see that the upscaler has difficulty calculating all those extra pixels.