Resolution Questions

[harshness]

It is painfully obvious that your current HDTV has a really poor scaling system. It will continue to haunt you until you replace it with one that has a better scaling system. Remember that only the Disney and Fox channels are 720p. Most all other HD programming is 1080i: HD disc formats, other networks and movie channels. Modern motion compensation electronics have taken the Alvy arguments almost out of the picture (assuming that your brain didn't take care of it anyway).

It doesn't really matter how you think your being sold short by your existing TV. No amount of theorizing and research is going to fix it. It won't assure you of not making the same mistake again either. TVs of all technologies can have poor scaling and motion compensation. It isn't limited to DLP. If the TV looks like too good a value, that's probably why.

What hasn't changed in all of this is that there are no useful metrics that you can study and grind and chew on that will tell you which TV is better than the others. Your perception is the only tool you need and the only one that you can't confuse.

 

[Gene T.]

It really doesn't look that bad on CBS and NBC ect....It just doesn't look as good as ABC (Disney) and FOX. I was just curious to what I was actually looking at in terms of resolution ect... I knew it wasn't the same between ABC, FOX and CBS, NBC. Is there any way to figure out how good the scaling and motion compensation is on other TV's beyong looking at them in a store? I never read much about this type of tv software in reviews and such. Like I said in a earlier post there so much up in the air when going to a Best Buy, Circuit City ect... You really never have a good understanding to how the tv is set up, cable length, type of cable, what media is going through it, setting on the TV's, how old they are, brightness ajustments ect..Basically I hope they just get rid of this stupid 1080i it fuc#ing ridiculious. Our country is so corrupt sometimes. You would think with all the new TV sets being Plasma, LCD and DLP and all of them being Progressive systems the Networks, HBO,CBS,NBC would of all went with 720P. It kind of shows you the corruption. Interlaced is basically a dead technology but don't tell America that. Like I said what I think my TV is doing with CBS and NBC is the 720p displays show native 720p signals directly, of course. They also upconvert SD signals (like DVD) up to 720p for display. And 720p displays must convert incoming 1080i signals to 720p before they can be displayed. No surprise there, this makes sense. What most of the manufacturers are doing to convert 1080i signal is to just take one 540 line field from each 1080i frame (which is composed of two 540 line fields) and scaling that one field up to 720p, ignoring the other field. Reason being, it takes a lot less processing power to do this than to convert the image to 1080p and scale that, which would use all the information in the original signal to derive the 720p signal. If you have a display like this, it means that you’re watching 540 lines of resolution upconverted to 720p. This is not HD, just like watching a DVD upconverted to 720p is not HD. Sure, you’ll get the full width of the 1080i resolution, but you’re only getting half the height. While this is better than DVD, it’s not HD in my mind. So basically it doesn't matter what set you buy 99% of all the Plasmas, LCD's and DLP's do it this way. It just a shame because CRT's are dead, I mean DEAD but there really the only TV's that show the 1080i signal in it's pure format no conversions needed. And like you said most of the HD content out there over the air is 1080i. Ludicrous!!!!!Thank You for all your help.