CEDIA 2009

At CES last January, a group of journalists was invited to see a demo of HQV processing after the brand and intellectual property had been bought from Silicon Optix by IDT. Unfortunately, we were sworn to secrecy until the development was farther along. At CEDIA, the embargo has finally been lifted, and I can write about the new HQV Vida processing chip, which was launched at the end of July.

The new chip includes three main features—StreamClean, which cleans up much of the noise in low-res video such as YouTube, Resolution Enhancement, IDT's new upconversion algorithm, and Auto HQV, which automatically sets the processing parameters based on the input signal. Internally, the chip uses 12-bit processing and offers 6-axis color control. Also, it offers SD and HD noise reduction; by contrast, the Silicon Optix Reon chip has SD noise reduction only.

The demo we saw included some clips downloaded from YouTube with a resolution of 320x240, which were upconverted to 480i in order to put them on a DVD. The chip then upconverted that to 1080p and send a split-screen signal to a Samsung LCD TV—one side of the screen had noise reduction, while the other side did not. The difference was dramatic, with much less macroblocking and mosquito noise in the noise-reduced image. Yes, the noise-reduced image was a bit softer, but that's a small price to pay for such an improvement. Look for products with the Vida chip next year.