


If you have a UHD Blu-ray player paired with an older or lower-quality 1080p or 4K TV, you might even get better results by running all video signals through the Blu-ray player rather than the television. Manufacturers rarely disclose their upscaling hardware choices, but higher-end TVs (Opens in a new window) should have improved upscaling capabilities. In some cases, you might be better off using a GPU to drive a picture than relying on the TV's native rescaling capability, while other TVs have excellent upscalers. Keyword: "should." Video scalar quality in TVs can vary widely between different product families. This upscaled image will not be identical to a native 4K signal, but it should offer a better picture than what was previously available on your 720p or 1080p television. Upscaling a 1080p image into 4K means taking an image originally encoded in 1920x1080 and algorithmically transforming it into what a higher-resolution version of the same image ought to look like. There is a difference between upscaling and what we call native resolution. Some AI upscaling approaches work in real-time and some do not. The word “upscale” generically means “to improve the value or quality of something.” In the video and PC space, it’s almost always a reference to increasing the effective resolution of a piece of content.

Upscaling technology is now built into a variety of consumer devices you can purchase and there are software packages available for video editing as well. In addition to invalidating several decades worth of nerd complaints about how looking at the screen and saying "Enhance" does absolutely nothing, it's now possible to upscale video dramatically and improve overall quality in the process. Over the last five years, video and image upscaling - the process of turning a lower-resolution video or photo into a higher-resolution image - has gone from the realm of research papers and tech demos to commercial products.
