I do not currently have a Blu player (will probably eventually get an Oppo as I love my Oppo dvd player now.)

Anyhow, I have been purchasing the Disney sets recently that contain DVD/Blu/DigiCopy in order to eventually be able to watch the Blu.

My question... I see some great deals on Blus out there but already own the dvds. Don't most Blu-players upscale already? And if so, is double-dipping for Blu worth it (putting aside any bonus features that may be available) or is the upscale pretty decent. If a movie or tv show wasn't filmed in HD already can it really be enhanced that much to make Blu a viable option?

We bought an £250 LG Bluray player last year to replace a £900 six-year old top-of-the range Pioneer. The Pioneer can upscale up to 1080i but we found that there was little or no improvement in PQ over 720p (the TV will only do 1080i anyway).

We were pleasently surprised at the improvement in PQ of DVDs played on the LG, and the upupscaling capability of the newer machine is such that we now run them at 1080i; and this from a "cheaper" player to boot. Technology marches on.

We have one double-dip, which is the Matrix trilogy in both DVD and BD, and yes, the BD PQ is superior to that of the DVD, which is, I suppose, as it should be, even at 1080i.

Without hesitation i'll upgrade anything that wasn't anamorphic on DVD.

Same answer, something only ever released 4x3 on DVD.

If i had that much will power i'd be much happier.

Turns out i'l' upgrade almost anything if the DVD is less than $12-13. (and that isn't a hard limit).

Apparently i'm an upgrade slut.  I'll upgrade almost anything that moves.

Sigh!

A 720P image MAY be of better quality than a 1080i image. A 1080i (interlaced) image is made of two filelds of 540 lines of resolution for each of the two fields creating a single frame, While a 720p (progressive) has 720 lines of resolution for each screen of data.

No matter what, an upscaled image can never compete with an image that is native to that resolution. In short:

- upscaling DVD to HD : the image contains only data for a certain number of dots. What upscaling does is adding extra dots and calculate the color those dots should have by using an algorithm. For example, the original image has a white and a black dot next to each other. When upscaling, extra dots are added in between and given various shades of gray to transition from that black to that white dot. As sophisticated as some of those algorithms are, this is never a perfect image as it is in a way a 'best guess', it only extrapolates to fill in gaps of data that isn't on the disc

- native HD images contain enough data for all dots, so no such guess-work or extrapolation is needed

I've noticed that on occasion such upscaling of DVD's can yield good results. Better of course than just watching them on a SDTV with DVD-player of course. But when comparing to a decently authored Blu-ray, the difference in quality is very noticeable: depth of blacks, color fidelity, natural film grain, vividness of the image, and so on.

Also note that the age of a movie or TV series doesn't necessarily mean that Blu-ray can't offer an upgrade in quality. It doesn't need to have been filmed with HD cameras. Just look at the Star Trek The Original Series season box sets on Blu-ray: completely remastered video image with DTS HD-MA 7.1 lossless audio. Superb!

If you would like to see for yourself, there are a lot of DVD vs Blu-ray screenshot comparisons here:
http://www.zonadvd.com/modules.php?name=Sections&secid=12
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=811102

So in short, I'd say it's worth to upgrade DVD to Blu-ray, but before deciding it's better to read online reviews to see if the gain in quality is sufficient over DVD (a very poorly mastered Blu-ray could look worse than DVD, potentially).

And as Lyonden pointed out: there's not substitute for a nicely mastered lossless track. Since moving to Blu-ray, my home theater has never received so much love as it does now 

I have DD on a few.  The ones I decide are worthwhile are typically the ones that have fantastic visuals or if the sound quality improvement can be justified.

Matrix is one.  The presentation is fantastic in BD. 

Man on the Moon, would not be a choice to upgrade.

It is all personal.  Today, I try to buy combos, if possible.

Charlie

Non-anamorphic discs are the first to get upgrded for me:

Natural Born Killers Director's Cut looks as awesome as it can (some scenes are rough, but they were shot 16mm or maybe even 8mm)

The Thing (if you have the old dvd)

From Dusk Till Dawn (Canadian disc, found at FYE in the mall in US, too bad it's got no extras)

Waiting for The Edge to get around $10 or less (probably would've spent the  $15 if it had a trailer or something for extras), same with Escape from L.A., but that one is $20 cheapest so far.

Can't wait for Ravenous, com'on now Fox!

See synner_man's post below this, all those reasons as well. But I do read reviews on if it's really worth it. For instance, Predator 2 is one of my all-time favorite films (yeah yeah, eat it!) but I haven't picked that up yet as all reviews say the current BD is basically scheise. Even when it went on sale for $10 I passed.

That being said, upscaled dvds look great to me, esp. stuff you know will probably never get a BD release like my low-budget horrors. Blu always looks better, although with True Romance I could not see a marked difference between the BD and DVD (except for obvilous dnr on the BD, the dvd seemed to have more detail in the scenes I tested back to back). Shame as that's another favorite with a sub-standard BD.

Quoting synner_man:

Quote:
Reason #6) Something extra that makes it stupid not to buy: A movie ticket for a film you are planning to see anyway.  I picked up several double-dip blu-rays a week ago (the 1st 3 Die Hard films, Transporter 1 & 2) because they can with movie tickets to your choice of The A-Team, Knight and Day and Predators.  The movie tickets are worth $10 and the cost of the blu-rays ranged from $12.99 to $14.99.  So essentially I bought the blu-rays for $3 to $5, since I had plans to pay for the films anyway.

Yep, I had forgotten about this one.