If you've seen some of my other recent videos
on up scalers you will notice that I did a review about
which upscaler is the best but in that video I limited all of my upscalers
to those devices that were less than $150 but in the comments
I got a request to review the "Gefen composite to HDMI upscaler" this upscaler of course is a little more expensive
as it runs for around $250 but as the old.. adage goes "you get what
you pay for" and in the case... for the Gefen device, this
holds true. If you don't know what an upscaler is, or
how you would use one to convert videos I suggest you check out my previous video,
I will leave a link to them in the description, along with a card at the end of this video Be aware I am not sponsored by anyone
I am just a gadget guy with a practical sense, and these are just my opinions, good or bad Before we continue on our discussion around
the Gefen upscaler if you could do me a huge favor
and hit that Like and SUBSCRIBE button I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you. lets get into it Now if you don't remember what an upscaler
is in short an Upscaler takes some form of analog
signal and upscales it or converts it to some digital form
generally turning a lower resolution video into a higher one and it does this while trying to minimize
the amount of distortion that is caused by stretching the original image
to fill the larger screen So if you have not seen my other upscaler
video I'm going to compare this Gefen device against
my top rated device from that other video which was the Yitrox upscaler So out of the gate we can just compare these two devices on price the Yitrox device ran for about $38
but it did require you to get a better power supply
due to the fact that the one that came with it was junk,
and produced noise in the videos it converted, you can watch the other video to understand
that issue better. But if you combine the Yitrox upscaler and
the power supply, cost wise that solution is around ~$53 If we use that as our starting point for comparison. The Gefen device runs for $249 on amazon as
of the time of this video, so we are talking almost a $200 dollar difference. I am also going to throw out there that in
this case, I do believe you get what you pay for. Because I will admit the picture the Gefen
produces, is very nice, and out of the box
I had no issues with the device in any way Take a look at this example
If you look at the same rafting video I have been using, the colors from the Gefen device
are much more vivid looking at the yellow in the Raft, it looks
like it is actually "yellow" where with the Yitrox the color is more orange
or washed out yellow. picture wise
I felt they both did a comparable job, and are on par with one another
but you DO have to take into count the color quality
as that does make a difference. Also I am upscaling a video from 20 years
ago.. so I can't expect miracles here Please note
The videos you see here are the original, untouched versions
I am not touching up the videos in these tests, I am just using the device out of the box
and letting the device just do its thing When we being to compare features of each
device with the Yitrox
the only real setting you can change is its resolution. for which the Yitrox will give you 11 different
options for output resolutions. and those do include some 4 by 3 and 16 by
9 ratios Where in comparison, the Gefen device provides
18 different possible options as I have displayed them all for you here I will also put these in the description below,
along with the table by name, because the Gefen for some reason,
displays the resolution by the "standards name",
and not the pixel resolution If we were just talking about the Yitrox device
our comparison would over But the Gefen device gives you many other
options you can choose from and even further adjust the video quality
it outputs As we can see here:
The Gefen device has a menu button and a (plus) and (minus) button on the side Pressing the Menu button brings up an on screen
menu that gives you a few options you can change Walking through the menu: We can first see that we can adjust the Contrast,
or Brightness Then Under the "Finetune" option
We get the ability to adjust the Hue, Saturation, sharpness, and Noise Reduction Under the "Color" option
We get the ability to change the Red, Green, Blue values and then with the "Size" Option we get the
5 choices: Full - Default
overscan underscan
letterbox panscan If you didn't catch that.. you might need
to rewind and do that again... Editing that was fun The Output option:
Give us the ability to select any one of the 18 different resolutions
as I have already shared with you. Which includes multiple 4 to 3 and some 16
to 9 aspect rations under "Sound"
We can choose the sound to come from the composite Left/Right
Or the optical We can also just turn off the sound all together You can also change the On Screen Display
location and timeout values If we compare the physical devices The Gefen is more than twice the size of the
Yitrox, and for Inputs when we compare the Yitrox to the gefen
we can see that both of the devices have composite inputs, and a s-video input The Yitro does have a HDMI input where the
Gefen does not but in most of my examples we are trying to
upscale analog composite signals not really digital ones, so I don't know how
important it is that the hdmi input The Gefen device also has the ability to take
in Optical sound in addition to the Composite Left / Right connectors Now as for the outputs Both the Yitrox and the Gefen provide a digital
HDMI as the output and they both have an audio output jack for
sound. Now the Gefen device has the additional Optical
output should you want to use that. Now in the box with the Gefen you will also
get what looks like a high quality composite video cable and for the power supply,
it seems to be of a high quality unlike the Yitrox,
which as you saw in my other video I shared with you that you would need to purchase a
better one But for the Gefen device, I did not get any
of the discoloration, or the power issues, and the Gefen power supply does come with
all the adapters for international use. and it clearly supports both NTSC and PAL
formats Overall the Gefen device is superior to the
Yitrox device, and it seems you will get a better quality
image compared to the Yitrox, but it will cost you more So if you have the budget to get this device
over the Yitrox brand, I would have to agree with the folks that
left the recommendation in the comments and go with this gefen device
it is a great upscaler, and worth the money So I will leave you with a little more sample
here, and I have had multiple requests to provide
longer samples of the difference devices So I will leave that video linked here, along
with the original Upscaler review As always thanks for watching Please remember to like and subscribe Have a great rest of your day. and catch you next time.
