News

Calibre UK Launches the Vantage-HD Image Scaler and Switcher (8/9/2005)

Vantage-HD is an awesome image scaler and switcher that will instantly give your home theater a new image make-over. Designed and manufactured by Calibre UK, Bradford, England, Vantage-HD is being launched at CEDIA 2005, Indianapolis September 9th - 11th Booth 1734.

Few people realize when they purchase their first hi-definition TV set that the majority of TV programming is still delivered as standard definition. Even true HDTV transmissions, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources are often still interlaced or have significant noise and compression artifacts present. To make matters worse, in order to fill a high resolution HDTV screen, the SD image has to be enlarged but then all the flaws in the original image are enlarged too. This is why so many home theater viewers find that their new projector, plasma or LCD doesn't provide the expected increase in image quality and may even appear more noisy or less clear than their old SD system or CRT set. Vantage-HD gets to the very heart of this problem.

The video processing built into most home theater displays and progressive-scan DVD players has limited processing ability and runs basic algorithms none of which can match the awesome power of Vantage-HD's 1T-flop DSP with 30-bit 4:4:4 scaler datapath, 12-bit component video A/Ds and studio quality 10-bit video decoder with super-adaptive comb filter and 4 x ITU656 over sampling.

Vantage-HD includes per pixel multi-angle aperture-adjusted motion-compensated de-interlacing of both SD and HD images, with full de-interlace performance on 1080i formats as well as 480i and 576i, out performing all competitor algorithms providing a level of de-interlacing quality previously only found in high end studio facilities.

Vantage-HD expertly processes film based material with full automatic detection of all pull-down cadences including broken cadences and non-standard cadences typically found in animation sequences, as well as the common 3:2 and 2:2 formats, all with automatic scene change detection to ensure clean cuts between scenes and the ability to process mixed scenes where film and video are overlaid.

Lip-Sync errors significantly degrade the home theater viewing experience Vantage-HD automatically adjusts the audio time-line to suit its internal video processing delay. Audio time-line correction operates on all audio channels-digital coaxial, digital fiber-optic, analog and HDMI audio channels. It's easy to see that Vantage-HD is far more than just another scaler.

For DVD and digital cable/satellite users Vantage-HD provides real-time MPEG artifact reduction while leaving picture detail intact. Even conventional external scalers don't fix all picture defects, even those considered benchmarks in home theater cannot reduce MPEG noise and cannot run their full de-interlace algorithms on HD signals due to a lack of real-time processing power. Vantage-HD with its very powerful DSP overcomes all these limitations. Calibre harnesses the power of Silicon Optix' Realta HQV(tm) chipset and Teranex algorithms to bring you that much wanted Hollywood Quality Video(tm) to your home theater.

Vantage-HD has special processing features suited to many types of display devices with specific algorithms designed to significantly clean up the inherent noise and grayscale irregularities in plasma displays. The level of improvement in your home theater viewing experience when using Vantage-HD with a plasma screen is simply awesome - Vantage-HD gives even budget plasmas a major image makeover. For projection users Vantage-HD has the sharpest most flexible keystone correction on the market, with full image warping available as an option.

Vantage-HD with its HQVTM image quality and easy to integrate switching capabilities will become the very heart of your home theater system providing a level of image enhancement and picture clean-up previously only found in film/TV post processing studios on equipment costing from $50K up to $250K, way outside the budget of most home theater users. Calibre have now made this technology affordable for the first time to home theater users with Vantage-HD's MSRP of under $2,900.

www.calibreuk.com