The question of image scaling in the home television device has almost become a foregone conclusion. But few consumers realize their choices are more vast than they know. The defaults on many HDTV and LCD models are more flexible yet the purchaser rarely pursues a custom installation. With today’s intermedia applications, graphics control is something every consumer needs to know.
If you’ve ever walked out of a movie with a headache or blinking your eyes, you know that something wasn’t quite right. Films are sent to screening rooms and theaters using settings devised by the film distributors, and these don’t always match the current screens on the cinema wall, nor does every movie theater always have the right size screen available.
In many cases, this mimics the problem some home consumers of LCD and HDTV have at home. The TV is nice, new, and huge, but hurts their eyes to watch. The effect of this is those super-slim looking movie stars because the video display ratio is maladjusted. These films and those overly squat television video captures show their age because the digital standards for video did not allow post distribution alteration except on very exclusive equipment.
For this reason some older screens have video lag in the frame rate due to older mechanism data transfer maximums. The external scaler must operate at slow speeds. Upgrading circuitry may be impossible due to the age of the video display device or extinct manufacturing standards and obsolete parts required. Upconverting may be the only way to deliver customization when output resolutions cannot be altered.
Film lovers know that when they watch a movie from the 1960’s or even the 1920’s, the resolution, color quality, and scale quality can be a dramatic touch to the final DVD recording. The move towards storing video media on DVD altered the way film is transferred, vended and broadcast. Now HDTV is almost impossible to avoid through normal broadcast channels.
Many customers still shudder at the “pan and scan” trend that reduced epic movie scenes shot on wide angle lenses to a fraction of their impact. This is a very low quality home theater experience. Many TV consumers make the mistake of thinking they need to move the TV farther away, when really an internal mechanical adjustment can alter the device’s pattern of video display.
To be sure, original TV settings were universal. But foreign competition made televisions more sophisticated. Original television manufacturer were outspent by newer companies, newer brands. DVDO and Lumagen gave way to newer technologies, most of which are barely scraping the consumer market. Faroudja makes some excellent devices. These scientific breakthroughs were designed for use in science and medicine, and only after long term investment and development could these be reproduced on a scale the public consumer could afford.
Sometimes a composite video solution is just one cable connection away. Gaming consoles also have variable screen resolution and their playthroughs may not scale to the larger screen in a way that is healthy for for vision during optimized extended play. The ability of the channel to deliver adequate information to an optimized scale selection depends on the speed and bandwidth of a given signal.
Buying secondhand TV and audio equipment can be perilous for this reason. Due to factory defaults, some devices may only function in certain regions. If your media comes from generally one region such as North America, or Western and Central Europe, your video titles and game products must match those video display specification for optimum picture scale.
Buying and customizing video devices and settings to match regional settings quality and manufacturer defaults, as well as consumer taste, is the hybrid that make the home theater project such a challenge. Image scaling is an element of video display quality no home consumer can
afford to overlook.