Originally Posted by Mr Meridian
Mark's point is very interesting though that BD discs downsampled to SD still look better than DVDs. I didn't know that!

Again, this is clearly demonstrable. DVD's have a limited bitrate and often that full available capacity is not used (same is true for blu too.) When you compress video to DVD using mpeg2 you introduce lots of visible artefacts; mosquito noise, macro blocking, i-frame pulsing, chroma noise etc etc. And if you don't use the full available bitrates these issues are exacerbated. With blu-ray, downscaled to SD resolution, you have the opportunity to take a significantly superior source, clean of such compression artefacts, and deliver a much higher bitrate version than you can get on DVD, crucially still clean of mpeg2 compression artefacts for a superior image.

So, even if you only have an SD display, you can still benefit from blu-ray vs DVD in image quality, and make huge gains in sound quality.

Mark

My Music : My Cinema