While TV manufacturers love to brag about the refresh rates, resolution and contrast ratios on their LCD and plasma panels, it’s not often that you hear them huffing and puffing about the video processing units within all the slick new sets. Toshiba broke that mold on Wednesday by making the grandiose announcement that it would be using the Cell microprocessor in future TVs, but having seen it in person, I now see why the processing guts of a TV set are such a low-key aspect of it. You just don’t notice what it does very much.
The main use Toshiba sees for the brutal Cell processor is scaling up 1080p content to the ridiculously large 4K x 2K panels that we will start to see in next-gen TVs. Since 4K content isn’t readily available yet, this seems to make sense, but Toshiba’s demonstration of 1080p content scaled to four times its size looked… like 1080p content scaled to four times its sized. Though an admirable attempt, noise was quite visible, and the end result was nowhere near as stunning as the 4K panels Sony showed off last year that actually leveraged true 4K content.
The other, probably more practical use: digitally cleaning up low-res content for display on 1080p displays. Toshiba’s demo of this, too, disappointed. I wanted to see vast improvements in raw YouTube footage stretched to 1080p and placed side-by-side with Cell-treated YouTube footage, but it just wasn’t there. It was a muddy mess with a few less digital artifacts.
As the PlayStation 3 attests, the Cell works miracles for rendering online worlds. But as far as video processing is concerned, there’s only so much upscaling – even the best upscaling – can do.
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