HDlink showing interlacing?

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

LCD displays are progressive and do not include native support for displaying interlaced video. HDLink Utility 1.71 includes an Interlace Simulation mode which should help interlaced video to look better on a progressive, LCD display. Having said that, HDLink is already having to perform some trickery to display PAL footage on a display that does not support 50 Hz so it is possible that the two factors combined will make it difficult for the video to look great on your monitor.

SD monitors are so inexpensive that, when we created HDLink, we thought that people would only use it for HD and hence the name “HDLink”. It was revolutionary in that there was nothing like it at the time with such quality and at such a low price. What did surprise us was the way that people used HDLink and we received requests to provide standard definition support. No sooner had we added that than customers told us that it was nice but looked pretty small on a 23″ monitor and it would be great to view it at x2 size. So we did that and next customers requested 16:9 scaling and so on. If you review the information on our HDLink product page, you’ll notice that we have lots of details about how it’s great for use with HD and we only fleetingly mention that it can be used for NTSC and PAL as it is primarily aimed at HD video but has some SD capabilities.

It’s quite exciting to see how customers adopt our products and find new ways to use them. One of the nice things about HDLink is that it has a USB port so we can easily flash upgrade the firmware to add new features. In the current example, we received reports from standard definition users that interlaced video did not look great and particularly when it was displayed at x2 scaling on the progressive LCD monitor. So our engineers have worked hard on this problem and we’ve released a software update which should improve the display of interlaced video on progressive LCD monitors. The nature of the technology means that this cannot be perfect but we believe the new software offers a definite improvement, particularly in HD.

If you mainly want to work in SD and with interlaced video, then a CRT is still the best choice. If you mainly work in HD, then HDLink is great quality so you can see every pixel in your image. The interlaced simulation mode in the HDLink 1.71 software does seem to offer a significant quality improvement. Many people use both a component analog CRT display in addition to a HDLink with a LCD so that all aspects of the video can be seen.

If you haven’t already updated to the latest software, you can find it at https://www.blackmagic-design.com/support/software/.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design