I keep reading the thread because I hope more people who have upgraded to HDTV and HD players will post about their experience - does everyone who has done that find DVDs unwatchable? I am not crazy about making my entire DVD collection obsolete overnight, and there are some that have no prospects of every being released in UHD.
"Unwatchable" is a strong word. "Suboptimal" would be my description.
I still watch a lot of DVDs on my HD equipment where Blu-rays are not available. In my experience, how good they look upscaled has a lot to do with the source material -- especially whether it's a show that was shot
and finished on film, or whether it was shot and/or edited on video.
For example, my
Adventures of Superman (1950s) DVDs look a lot better than my
Superboy (1980s) or
Lois & Clark (1990s) DVDs. Why? Because the first is from film sources, the latter two from video.
Like a lot of shows of its period,
DS9 was shot on film, but final editing was done on video. This was faster and cheaper production-wise, but resulted in lower-quality visuals. The TOS DVDs always looked better than the Berman-era shows, even on SD equipment, because TOS was finished on film, with its higher resolution.
Another factor is the settings on your TV. When I first got an HDTV, my DVDs of the 1970s
Wonder Woman TV series looked terrible at first, until I switched the TV's auxiliary input picture setting to "Cinema." After that, they upscaled very nicely (again, the DVDs having been mastered from film sources).
Bottom line, I would not hesitate to upgrade to HD equipment for fear of rendering your DVDs obsolete. Some discs may suffer a bit, but the overall benefits of HD are very much worth it, IMO.
Hope some of that's helpful. I'm also going to
@Ovation here, in case he'd care to comment on my comments, or otherwise weigh in. I've found him to be a knowledgeable source on this subject.
