What is up converting and down converting (scaling)?
A. Before we get into this, it is important to know that LCD’s and Plasma TV sets are fixed pixel displays. This means that any resolution that is above, or below the screens native resolution (the actual amount of dots the screen displays) will be squeezed or stretched to fill the space the screen allows. eg. You own an LCD TV that has a native resolution of 1366×768. You feed a 720p signal to this display. 720p has a resolution of 1280×720, so of course, that means it fits into a smaller area of your LCD’s screen. What your TV will then do, is stretch the smaller image up to the size of your TV set, so that it fills the entire screen. This is known as “up converting”, or “up scaling”, as it is scaling the image up to the screens native resolution to fit it across the entire screen. You’ve probably guessed it, but when you feed a signal of 1080i to this same screen, it will of course, have to “down convert” the image to fit on the screen, as 1080i has a resolution of 1920×1080, which
