Nevertheless, the explanations I've seen don't make any sense. Upscaling is just interpolation, and nothing about interpolation should make the image blocky. The resolution over most of the image is fine when upscaled, but parts of the image are blocky, especially the less brightly lit parts of the image, or parts that are in motion (possibly for two separate causes).
Thats down to the colour profile the TV is using (16-235) and when it upscales its basically guessing what information should go where using that LIMITED range of colour. DVDs typically are (this now gets technical) 8-bits per colour YCbCr with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling. YCbCr signalling basically means its a cut back/down version of RGB for transmitting a signal the 8-bits is the colour depth (amount of colours/shades available) and chroma subsampling is how those colours behave with adjacent pixels.
Your TV is obeying the standard when it upscales, where as when your monitor upscales it is likely also doing additional work to the colour space and then displaying it in whatever your monitor uses natively (for monitors thats normally 16 bit or more common today 32 bit colour). A monitor is also likely to support something called 4:4:4 chroma where as your TV despite it being 4K may not. That may only support a max of 4:2:2.
The chroma chart on this page and the image (not the video) gives a better idea of what is going on......
http://www.pixla.ch/blog/files/26139a69b347ab497071cb7cb0510560-5.html
The image of the small train (on the left) on this wiki page also shows what could be happening.... In fact that is probably better.... hint look at the red square on the side of the train 4:4:4 is how it should look, the lower the chroma though (images to the left) the more blocky it starts to look
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling
Is that the type of "blocking" for 4:2:0 chroma you are talking about?? Typically the worse scenes will be dark/night scenes with slabs of black looking kind grey and rather than it looking smooth between the black and grey it will look like loads or blocking between the darkest black and grey bits of the image.
Water especially underwater and Blue shades also often look like rubbish with a low chroma value.
CakeHole, thanks, I just saw your post. I'll have to digest it later.
I think upscaling can be done properly, however, because I've seen it on an LG (played through an unknown DVD player, however). A DVD video must be upscaled somewhere in the chain in order to display it, unless I want to look at a tiny image in a big screen. With any luck maybe I can improve the situation a bit.
A few things i would try first....
1) If your DVD player has one and you are not yet using it connect it up via HDMI socket.
2) If the DVD player has a "progressive" setting somewhere in its menus try that on and off (some manufacturers will name this stupid things like film mode or smoothing)
3) If both the TV and the DVD have some option to "upscale" make sure only ONE OR THE OTHER is in use, do not enable both (again may require some investigating if the manufacturers have named it something stupid like "lifelike mode")
4) if the TV with devices connected via component or HDMI allow it alter the colour space, (AGAIN some manufacturers will have silly names for this function (check TV manual) others will just have a menu setting which you can switch to RGB, Limited and similar settings.)
5) If the TV does not appear to have a colour space setting look in the DVD player for RGB and composite or similar setting and try altering that back and forth to see if that helps.
Considering its a modern 4K TV the required setting in menus should be there to make it properly upscale, any so called "auto" options in its menus may also be worth a play. Look through all the picture settings first then the TV settings, check manual on how to reset to default setting should you screw something up or forget what you altered
Furthermore, the TV has no difficulty whatsoever in upscaling or downscaling a still picture. It's just video that is affected, and it flat out botches almost any video that's not 1080. I did see another 4K TV that did not show this defect on the same test DVD. That's all the proof that I need that it can be done right.
Nope it wont have isues with stills because still images (like jpegs from your camera or phone) are typically full RGB in 16 or 32bit colour so the TV does not have to guess the colour space, chroma and so much more, it can just basically get away with resizing the image. and your eyes as they see in colours rather than pixels can basically not tell the difference, even more so on a 4k TV if it is upscaled, even with your nose right against the screen if its upscaled properly you will have a hard time telling the difference in pixel size between it upscaling to 1080 and 4k, mainly because when its doing a still at 4K it does not have to do much to subpixels as there is no motion to deal with. You may still see it but if you can switch between 1080 and 4k on the same still image there is no way you will see 4x more pixels on the 4K version (because alot of them will either be the same or adjacent pixels will have the same colour).
