Be Excellent To Each Other

My parents are treating themselves to a Blu-ray player and, being their technical support, I have been asked about the feature that some have where they "upscale" standard def DVDs to some form of medium level inbetween.

I've never actually owned one that does this. Is it a) a barely noticeable novelty or, worse, b) actually leads to a "worse" picture due to scaling artifacts?

It is a) noticeable and b) better, depending on tv of course.

It's an LCD rather than a plasma. Sony Bravia iirc.

I suspect a lot of people are avoiding this topic as it's more complicated that it initially appears. IIRC standard def DVDs are actually encoded at a higher res than old skool PAL CRT TVs were capable of displaying, so any upscaling device (some DVD players can do this, some games consoles and I imagine pretty much all Blu-Ray players will, though I think you'll definitely need to be plugged in via HDMI) will make a DVD look noticeably better when displayed via a HDTV. The problem is that DVDs looks so good that Blu-Ray discs become a non essential purchase for all but the best movies/transfers as they're too bloody expensive.
I can't really vouch for all Blu-Ray players I suggest you do your research. I have a PS3 plugged via HDMI into a 1080p LCD TV and DVDs do indeed look noticeably better than my DVD player (which is non upscaling) can manage.

DVDs look better on my BD player than they did with my old DVD player using the same TV, but some of that may be psychological.

Is that because your french dvd player made everything wonky?

They are encoded at 720x576i, which a half decent large CRT has no problem displaying. In fact in many ways a CRT is more suited to bog standard DVD output as they have no issues with interlaced material whereas even the best LCD or Plasma TV can make a hash of de-interlacing from time to time (because they have to de-interlace through design).

Of course because it is inherently an analogue display, the rough edges in the picture tend to get smoothed out. However a modern CRT set has no problem with 720x576i in the same way I have a nice Iiyama 19" monitor sitting outside my office that can do high resolutions. Bloody lovely picture but times have moved on.

LCD's and plasmas are designed to operate at one fixed resolution. They should have upscalers built in but the ones that come with the DVD players tend to be better.

All they do is upscale. They can't add detail. It's just a question of if it does a better job than the TV can.

BTW I have an upscaling VHS player with HDMI output at the office. So its not exclusively a DVD thing. They're rather essential if you want to send anything to a panel that isn't at its native resolution. Remember how bad old LCD monitors used to look if they were not at their native resolution? They didn't have upscalers built in. Your modern monitor should make a better job of it.

In short, you'd be hard pushed to find a Blu-Ray that doesn't upscale so don't panic.