OTHER TECH

The Real 1080i

Q. I have a Denon DVD-1920 player that upconverts DVDs to the 1080i HDTV signal format. Would there be a picture-quality improvement by switching to a new HD DVD player, since both would be playing 1080i on my plasma HDTV? Terry Harman Via E-Mail

A. Al Griffin says: Definitely. Although your Denon DVD player upconverts DVDs to a 1080i signal format, it doesn't add any detail, instead using a process called scaling to interpolate additional pixels based on the video information on the DVD. A major advantage of the new HD DVD format is that the video on the disc is encoded at true 1080p high-def resolution, then converted to 1080i for output - yielding a fivefold increase in picture detail over regular DVD.

Missing Audio

Q. My VHS tape library has a mix of off-air content and material transferred from a camcorder. Picture and sound play back fine on a VCR, but duped DVD copies don't play back the audio of the camcorder segments. What's up with that? Robert H. Whitney Burbank, CA

A. Ian G. Masters says: Without some details about your equipment, I can only speculate as to what's causing the problem. I suspect it has to do with linear audio tracks on some of the tapes and hi-fi (AFM) tracks on others, and your DVD recorder's ability to capture only one of them. Your hi-fi VCR should let you toggle back and forth between the two tracks, so a little experimentation will tell you which one is blank on the camcorder material. It may take some time, but you should be able to recopy those tapes using the correct track.

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