Here’s why DVDs may look bad on your UHD television and what to do about it
Q. The DVDs I try to watch on my new UHD television look awful. Is there any way to get them to at least the picture quality they had on my old HDTV?
A. This reader wrote in to complain of “tremendous pixelation” and “muddy image quality” when he plays a variety of DVDs on his 50-inch 2016 Samsung Ultra High Definition set, adding that Fios TV didn’ t look that great either.
The source hardware shouldn’ t be at fault: This frustrated viewer reported that the Fios box was only a year old, and both that and the Blu-ray player were connected to the UHD set with HDMI cables that should allow maximum picture quality.
But it is possible for visual fidelity to get lost in the translation from a DVD’s “480p” resolution (a maximum of 720 by 480 pixels) to the “4K” resolution (3840 by 2160 pixels) of ultra high definition .
Analyst Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate Technologies Corp., which tests and calibrates electronics’ picture quality, explained that a UHD TV has to scale up content to fit that resolution, and that can be a serious stretch for the video-processing system in the TV.
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“The biggest problem is that most TVs advertise that they ‘enhance’ DVD (and HD) picture content up to 4K by performing all sorts of ‘advanced’ image processing functions to add more picture detail, more sharpness, and more color, ” he wrote in an e-mail. “But all that does is add lots of picture noise and distortion because it is all artificially generated extraneous image detail that is not present in the original picture.”
He advised turning off those image-enhancement options on the TV, then making sure that the Blu-ray player was set to upscale DVDs to HD quality. (You’ ll probably need to dust off the manual to see where in its settings screen you’ d adjust such an option.) If you have one of the UHD-compatible Blu-ray players that began shipping early last year, you may be able to rely on that to do all the necessary upscaling.
A DVD’s own production values can also shape how it looks after upscaling; a lower-budget, 1980s-vintage flick may not look as sharp as a recent « Star Wars » release.
This reader’s experience points to two lingering problems with UHD.
One is the continued shortfall of stuff to watch in that resolution. After streaming services like Amazon and Netflix, you have a limited selection of UHD Blu-ray movies and not much else. DirecTV offers some live UHD TV, and that’s about it. Over-the-air UHD broadcasts are coming, but not current models include the required “ATSC 3.0” tuners.
The other is the invisibility of UHD’s extra pixels at many common viewing distances. When seen from an average couch, a 50-inch UHD set and a 50-inch HDTV will look just as sharp. Late-model UHD sets can display a wider range of colors using HDR, or “high dynamic range, ” a newer addition to the technology, and that can look significantly better.
Or you can wind up in a situation like this reader’s, where non-UHD, non-HDR material appears significantly worse than it did on a lesser set. And there’s not much to be done about that short of buying those movies all over again on Blu-ray instead of DVD.
Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D. C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro .
