what is "Progressive Scanning"

[Ryanwb]

I was at Best Buy today looking at DVD players, and the sales dude kept pushing this progressive scanning option...what the heck does it do for me?

 

[Chaplin]

It's basically how the video is delivered. Most players produce DVD video as interlaced, by fields--one line at a time--60 lines a second.

Progressive scan though, seems to be more about entire pictures rather than fields, and could produce a better image.

I know that's not a good explanation, but...

This is taken from the hometheaterforum's website, which is a good place to go for all sorts of video/DVD stuff...

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_7_4/dvd-benchmark-part-5-progressive-10-2000.html

Progressive Scan

Progressive displays, such as high-performance CRT/LCD/DLP/LCOS projectors and the new HDTV-ready TVs, can show progressive scanned images as opposed to interlaced. We learned above that an interlaced display shows 60 fields per second. But with progressive, each scan of the CRT face is a complete picture including all scan lines, top to bottom, now called a frame, and we are showing 60 of those per second. The benefits of a progressive display are no flicker, scan lines are much less visible (permitting closer seating to the display), and they have none of the artifacts we described for the interlaced display (as long as they are fed a real progressive signal).

But sources which are truly progressive in nature are hard to come by right now. Movies on DVD are decoded by the player as interlaced fields. All of the film's original frames are there, but they are just divided into "halves". What we're going to talk about next is how we take the interlaced content of DVD and recreate the full film frames so we can display them progressively. The term commonly used to restore the progressive image is deinterlacing, though we think it is more correct to call it re-interleaving, which is a subset of deinterlacing.

 

[green machine]

Basically progressive scan means the dvd player displays the resolution of the movie in order, as in: Line one, two, three, and so on. Regular dvd players are interlaced, they display lines: one, three, five, seven, and then fill in with two, four, six. The Progressive scan feature will really only help you if you have a high definition TV. If your tv supports it, however, make sure you get some good component video cables for the dvd player. Monster Cables are great. Component video will give you an awesome picture regardless if your tv is HD or not.

Side note: Which store did you go into? I work in the video department at the pavillions store.

adam