Fellowship of the Ring - HD vs DVD

**kracken** · 26th February 2006

check it out [here] , just wait till page loads and roll mouse over.

Being amazed at how fantastic the HD transfer of Fellowship of the Ring looked, I decided to compare it to the transfer on the DVD. Now, the DVD transfer is among the best you can find on DVD, so this really is comparing the respective creams of the crops.
I used WinDVD 6 to capture files from the DVD, and Elecard Mpeg2 player to capture from the HD stream. Both were captured directly to BMP files and converted to JPG at very high quality so there should be almost no artifacting introduced (sorry, the BMP files were too large to use).

I used Photoshop to bicubically resample the DVD source images from 852x480 to match the 1920x1080 of the HD images. This page features the HD image sampled down to the DVD's resolution of 852x480. Surprisingly, even at DVD-resolution the HD source features more detail.

Mouseover any of the images here to see the HD downsample. You can see the full-size comparisons by clicking on the images on this page. The difference is pretty amazing.

I tried to capture identical frames on both sources, but I missed by a frame or two on some of these.

**TheFincher** · 26th February 2006

That really is a big difference, cant say im too shocked

Nice post

TheFincher

**flumperino** · 26th February 2006

crikey, that is a big difference isn't it

nice post kracken

**Nikki** · 26th February 2006

nice post kracken, much of a difference

**Deadly** · 27th February 2006

Pretty impressive

Are there many HD discs out at the moment? brother got an HD dvd player the other week and a 32" HD lcd tv

**MonkeyBalls** · 27th February 2006

Originally Posted by Deadly

Pretty impressive

Are there many HD discs out at the moment? brother got an HD dvd player the other week and a 32" HD lcd tv

I don't think HD disks are availible properly yet over here. The HD compatible DVD players you can buy in the likes of Currys etc merely "upmix" your current DVDs to HD for displaying on a HD TV.

**partyman** · 27th February 2006

The HD pics there are from the a TV rip yeah?
I had quick looky at some of the TS files for Return of the King on newsgroups, bloody impressive quality but the whole film was about 35gig!

**beerman** · 27th February 2006

Got the link of a mate and was amazed. Check out scene 3, the level of detail in their faces in the DVD source is shit, all the faces look out of focus. The HD source adds the detail back in there faces.

**phlix** · 28th February 2006

The DVD rips were pretty sh*t, I get better quality when I rip pics on my PC. I even get better quality on my LCD TV when I pause my DVD player. My dvd player does upscan, but it shouldn't make that much difference, afterall I've had it for about a year and half.