I currently have an older DVD player, but it is in good working order. Will it work with a new HDTV 1080p LCD tv? Will the old DVD player cause any significant degradation of picture quality?
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Andrew A says
No.
Your DVDs will play back at exactly the same quality as they always have. The picture will look the same as it would on a non-HD TV of the same size.
A new DVD player won’t make much difference to this.
The output of the DVD player is 480i (some support 480p output but the actual DVD disc is still ony 480i) . Your TV will automatically scale this so that it fits your 1080p screen.
Some new DVD players (and Blu-ray players) will do the scaling to 1080p themselves rather than letting the TV do the work. This may or may not give an improvement in picture quality depending on how good a job of the conversion your TV does. Either way the difference is minimal.
Texperson says
If your dvd player has component, red/green/blue, outputs it will work. But dvds are 480 lines of resolution, so what happens is the tv takes the 480 lines and has to display them as 1080 lines, and it will upconvert the image by doing a fill in the lines kind of thing. The picture may look good to poor depending on the quality of the dvd transfer.
To get the full 1080p resolution to your tv, you need a blu ray player whose disks are 1080, so no fill in the lines necessary, and the pic is much clearer.
But if you have the component outputs, try the one you have. Be sure to go into the dvd player’s set up menu and set it for widescreen, etc., to match your new tv.