Say you have yourself a video at low-resolution, and want to upconvert it to a higher resolution for display on a higher-resolution television or monitor. That’s not hypothetical at all - it happens all the time when you display anything except HD on your HDTV. When you watch regular SD cable programming on your HDTV, your television (or maybe some processor between the cable feed and the television) has to take the incoming signal and convert it up to the resolution that your HDTV supports. Same thing goes for all those DVD movies collecting dust on your shelf (”I’ll watch them one day!”). Right now most processors just double up the pixels to make the image displayable in HD. Or quadruple. Or more, depending on the source and destination. That’s all well and good, but there’s got to be a better way.

Hitachi is working on that better way. They’ve done two things. The first is to look at subsequent frames in the video to interpolate some data that can be used in the image upconversion process to make it look better. The second thing they’re doing is to do with 3:2 pulldown. Processors have to take a 24 frames-per-second video and convert that to 60 frames per second. Typically by duplicating frames. Actually, duplicating some and tripling others. But Hitachi is working on a method to interpolate those frame instead. Kinda like the same thing as the other method, but on a whole-frame basis in stead of on a pixel basis.

The article doesn’t discuss a timeframe for these new features, but I think they sound promising. I don’t know if other companies are doing the same thing or not (like Sony with their “Digital Reality Creation” wizardry). But Hitachi’s stuff sounds cool. I’d like to see it. Unlike some people, but like most people, I still watch a lot of SD on my HDTV.

‘Higher Resolution View,’ ‘Smoother Motion,’ Hitachi Demonstrates Signal Processing Technologies for Next Generation TVs