I have a friend that is caught up in getting a 1080p TV so he can be cutting edge, even though he already has a 1080i TV. Since I work at a place that sells TVs he asked me for my advice. I’ve been thinking about the pluses for 1080p but realized there are some things I’m not sure about and I may have missed something.
Here’s what I am thinking about:
BluRay movies use 1080p.
Some PS3 games use that resolution, and I think some 360 games do as well (could be wrong).
None of the cable/satellite/OTA sources of TV use 1080p but a 1080p TV will essentially “upconvert” the signal (also not sure about this, could be wrong.)
1080p is “futureproof,” at least if you assume there will in future be a move towards that resolution for TV source signals.
1080p makes bigger screen TVs look better, all else being equal (obviously the source of the image has an impact here.)
Can anyone clarify some of this stuff? Anything I’m missing that might matter to a TV user? Why should someone pay the extra for 1080p given the limited sources that use that resolution?
Are you sure he has a 1080i TV? The only TVs that are actually 1080i (as opposed to being able to take 1080i input and convert to their native resolution) are CRTs.
If he’s got a CRT, it’s pretty obvious why he’s looking for a new TV (CRTs can have a great picture, but they’re huge and have constant convergence issues), and if he’s looking for a new TV, 1080p makes a lot of sense because it’ll display 1080i content better than a 720p TV, and there’s tons of that.
It is funny, I just had this conversation on the phone with my father this evening–he called to ask my advice about buying a new television. I guess the digital conversion advertising has him scared, though he claimed their TV is getting “dimmer and dimmer”. I suspect it has more to do with 75-year-old eyes than with the TV, but oh well.
At 75, the odds of him ever renting a Blu-Ray DVD are slim to none, and I know he won’t ever subscribe to HD cable; it was a huge fight just to get him to subscribe to basic cable, as he hates paying for it. So I told him to get a 720p, and not let the salesman upsell him.
He actually does have a CRT TV so there is that, but the picture quality is very good. He just thinks a 1080p TV would have better quality and that’s where I’m not so sure, other than for BluRay if/when he goes that route.
But the issue of 1080i being supported on current TV’s is confusing. Are 720p TV’s that say they support 1080i downscaling the image or how does that work?
The picture quality isn’t going to depend primarily on resolution, but on a bunch of other factors, like black levels and color fidelity. If he “upgrades” to a 1080p LCD, he’ll almost certainly have a worse picture in a lot of ways.
That said, a CRT is a fickle mistress, and if he isn’t maintaining it (I used to redo convergence monthly), it probably has godawful artifacts all over, in which case an LCD/plasma is going to look a lot sharper, way more than the difference between 1080i and 1080p. Plus, CRTs are just big and bulky and there are plenty of reasons to replace them that have nothing to do with image quality.
But the issue of 1080i being supported on current TV’s is confusing. Are 720p TV’s that say they support 1080i downscaling the image or how does that work?
Any modern TV has a fixed resolution display, like your computer monitor. The input signal is scaled to that resolution.
Considering what an uphill fight it was getting the industry to switch to 720p/1080i hi-def content, I kinda doubt native-1080p broadcast content will be coming anytime soon. I.e., I wouldn’t consider it a purchasing factor.
1080p makes bigger screen TVs look better, all else being equal (obviously the source of the image has an impact here.)
Technically true, but “all else” is almost never equal. A lot of factors go into determining a TV’s image quality and screen resolution is only one of them - and rarely is it the most important, IMHO.
If your father is as stingy and tech-adverse as mine, just tell him to pick up the Mar `09 issue of Consumer Reports, which has their latest review of LCD & plasma TVs. [I don’t think they even bother with RPTVs anymore.] It’ll probably make him feel better if he thinks he’s getting the best deal for his money.
AFAIK, all LCDs, plasmas, and LCD/DLP/LCoS RPTVs have a single fixed native resolution - usually 1280 x 720, 1366 x 768 (no idea where this one comes from), or 1920 x 1080 - and up- or down-scale any video source with a different resolution (EDIT: and if necessary converting an interlaced signal to progressive-scan), in which case image quality is heavily dependent on your TV’s scaler.
EDIT: BTW, speaking of the PS3 - IIRC when it was first released it wouldn’t upconvert a 720p source to 1080i output (the standard res of CRT HDTVs), but instead downconverted it to 480p, which upset some CRT HDTV owners. Was that ever resolved?
I probably wouldn’t buy a new TV currently if it wasn’t 1080p, but the only current reason to have 1080p is for Blu-Ray (maybe websurfing, if you do that on your TV).
Consoles won’t credibly use 1080p this generation - the hardware isn’t powerful enough without making more serious compromises.
In other words:
BluRay movies use 1080p.
yes
Some PS3 games use that resolution, and I think some 360 games do as well (could be wrong).
not in any meaningful way
None of the cable/satellite/OTA sources of TV use 1080p but a 1080p TV will essentially “upconvert” the signal (also not sure about this, could be wrong.)
False
1080p is “futureproof,” at least if you assume there will in future be a move towards that resolution for TV source signals.
Yes, but not for the reason you mention - TV source signals won’t be 1080p for the lifetime of that TV - far off. But the next generation of consoles will likely make more meaningful use of 1080p.
A 1080p display absolutely will upconvert signals. In the case of a 720p signal, it won’t have any more real information than a 720p display will, but in the case of a 1080i signal, it will. (Particularly if it’s a 1080i film source, in which case a good scaler doing 3:2 pulldown can reconstruct 1080p frames.)
And as for “looking better”, all else equal, a higher resolution will look better even with low-res sources, because the pixel structure is less evident. It’s not the biggest deal in the world, particularly going from 720p to 1080p, but it’s still a difference.
I have a 720 plasma…but my next will definitely be a 1080 (plasma or LCD is currently undecided but boy, plasma sure uses a ton of electricity)…reason- simply the price.
1080 has come down so much and so have lcd’s that for me there is no reason not bump up to 1080.
And I have to say, seeing my brother in law’s 1080 Sony LCD, well it does look better…not complaining about mine but I do see a difference…imho.
1280x720 is less than 1920x540, so, not really. More importantly, if you have a film source at 24fps, 1080i can give you the same amount of information as 1080p, assuming your video processor deinterlaces it properly.
Still, to the OP, I would say that most people do not need 1080p. If you want blu-ray and the possibility of playing SOME video games in it, ok, but both will scale down to 720 and still look quite good. In a few years, who knows. A TV can be a 5+ year investment, so it never hurts to get a good one.
You can get a 50 inch plasma 1080p (Panasonic Viera) for $1500, which is a great set with nice contrast (a more critical feature IMO than raw resolution, but why not get both, if you can afford it?).
I’ve been thinking about buying a HDTV, and maybe someone can give me some insight. Bigger 1080P TVs always seem choppy to me. Common models like a 46", etc Viera’s are annoying to watch for some reason. Smaller 720P models usually look better and don’t seem choppy to me. I’d like to get a larger 1080P but none have really impressed me.
They look bad because the feeds in the store are terrible, and the models are ridiculously misconfigured (if you have a minute to play with one, set sharpness to zero, contrast and brightness way down, all “enhancements” off, and color temperature to the warmest setting; it’ll look dull next to the hyped-up ones next to it, but it’ll also look a lot better).
To eliminate the choppiness (pulldown effect) when watching movies, you also want to make sure that you buy a player and TV which both support the 24hz mode. This allows the TV to display an exact 24 frames per second and not have to deel with the 3:2 pulldown effect needed to make 24 frames fit into 60 screen refreshes per second (hence the choppiness).
