News

posted on 01 June 2008 06:25

Toshiba has invented a large-scale integrated circuit that can take a standard 350,000 pixel DVD picture and uprate it to Blu-ray's 2 million pixel resolution. It will release DVD players with the circuit by the end of the year.

The idea is to be able to provide Blu-ray quality for a lower price than Blu-ray players and take advantage of the huge amount of DVD content available compared to the restricted range of Blu-ray content.

There is a little more here.

Since the pixels to support the higher resolution are not present in the DVD files then they must be inserted by calculating average color, luminance and contrast values for a group of pixels and inserting similar value pixels into the set. Such interpolation generally causes images to lose sharpness, particularly in boundary areas where colours and light and share change abruptly. It remains to be seen how good the Toshiba circuit's algorithms are.

^{[B&F staff.]}