The Clicker: Futureproofing with 1080p?
posted Sep 1st 2005 6:15PM
The conversation always goes the same way:
"So 720p is progressive, right?"
"Correct – that's what the p is for"
"But 720p has fewer pixels than 1080i, right?"
"Correct – bigger number and all"
"But 1080i is only 30 frames per second and is interlaced compared with 720p's 60 frames of progressive
goodness."
"Correct"
"So why not just get a 1080p display?"
And thus begins the seemingly-perpetual pining for 1080p. Not that the quest for 1080p is completely without merit.
As the conversation above illustrates, it doesnt take Newtonian levels of brainpower to see how 1080p might be a good
thing. If one could have all the benefits of 720p but with more pixels, it certainly couldnt hurt. But should you
really pay the premium for a 1080p set? Perhaps not.
The first problem is, of course, that there is no 1080p/60 broadcasting standard. Of the 18 ATSC standards, the
closest to 1080p/60 that youll get is 1080p/30, and while thats often better than 1080i/30 it still doesnt give
broadcasters the ability to handle fast-motion content such as sports.
Furthermore, the likelihood of 1080p/60 becoming a broadcasting standard is about as great as the lovechild of Britney
Spears and Kevin Federline penning the great American novel it aint gonna happen. Cable and satellite providers are
already looking to compress the signal. Theyre not about to pass twice the amount of data over those lines. And,
without content, really whats the point?
Clearly he doesnt understand that the PS3 will soon be pumping out 1080p, you start to mutter under your breath as
though Im completely unaware of the situation. Two HDMI ports pumping out 1080p, you continue. Great! To what are
they pumping this information? Are they handing this data to Samsungs 1080p DLP sets? Nope; they cant. Until recently
HDMI chips were unable to process 1080p/60 and while theyve broken through those limitations, few (if any) sets
actually include these new chips. Its been rumored that Sonys Qualia 1080p front-projector will start to include
1080p/60 HDMI technology. However, for those of us looking to spend less than thirty thousand dollars, this isnt a
great help.
But thats a short term view. These sets will eventually include those chips. OK. Lets move past the fact that
nearly all of todays 1080p sets wont accept an, uh, 1080p signal via HDMI. Will 1080p games really look much better
than 720p games? Games, at their heart, are rendered and vector-based. Once you get to the point where lines are drawn
without stair-stepping, added resolution is of marginal benefit. Yes, its possible that game developers could
incorporate high-quality 1080p textures. Will they? Its unlikely. They too are weighing all the options. Texture
memory is a precious resource, and with 1080p customers so few and far between, its a smarter choice for game
developers to use more medium-resolution textures than a smaller number of 1080p textures. The result? The difference
in your viewing experience is likely to be slim.
But the added resolution of a 1080p set makes everything look more film-like and thats what Im looking for.
Its possible that youre special. Its possible that youve got the eagle-eyes needed to detect individual pixels
while watching HD content at proper viewing distances. Most people cant. More often than not, pixel viewing problems
are caused by the black border around individual pixels (i.e. the screen-door effect) not by the number of
pixels.
Dont get me wrong; all things being equal 1080p will be better than 720p. The problem? Things are rarely equal.
Theres no doubt that there are those reading this who can appreciate the differences. Unfortunately most people
cant. Dont believe me? Listen to people exclaim how CSI is the best-looking show on television. Dig further and learn
that these same people are watching this 1080i show on a 720p set. Dig even further and you discover that most modern
sets convert 1080i to 720p by first chopping the 1080i down to 540p and then scaling it back up. Thats right less
resolution than 720p shows. The point? There are many different variables that contribute to the end result. The number
of pixels is just one small portion of the picture quality. Black levels, contrast, color-accuracy, etc. all play a
major role in the film-like look of a display.
In the end it really does come down to what you think looks best. Buying a 1080p display to future-proof
isnt the no-brainer that you think it might be, and if youre doing it for that reason, be sure that the set includes
the future-parts (e.g. 1080p/60 HDMI, motion-adaptive deinterlacing of 1080i content, proper pull-down of 1080i
content, etc.). If you dont, you might end up with more pixels and the same amount (or even less) of actual
data.
If you have comments or suggestions for future columns, drop me a line at theclicker@theevilempire.com.
good article. covered most the arguments quite well. will it stop me from drooling over that $40K 1080p projector on my wish list? hell no!
:D
oh, and I do have a few videos in HD-WMV9 format that are almost true 1080p resolution-- yum yum.
Good read. Thanks.
Great Job Peter. Now I know why I get so tongue tied trying to explain this to people. It is very hard to get the point across. I bet you had trouble getting article together.
yeah but if I want to use my tv as a computer monitor I want those extra pixels!
finally, a goog read. thanks!
Actually, to show 1080i content in it's native resolution, the screen itself is actually a 1080P screen. Whether the processor can handle a 1080P feed is a different thing entirely, but actually somewhat less important. That's why I keep wondering why people are so "down" on 1080p - when in actuality, you're also precluding your ability to watch 1080i natively. If you're content on watching 1080i TV which *IS* a broadcast standard at 540P upscaled to 720P, fine... otherwise, why wouldn't you want a screen that can handle currently broadcast HDTV?
This was one of the greatest articles I've read in a while, though, I'll get a new TV in 2006, and I'm planning on keeping it for a long time, like, 7-10 years. I want a really good high-res set, so I'll be sticking with getting a 1080p, on account of, who knows what the future holds?
Aren't you totally ignoring movies? I see the future as 1080p60 for games, 1080p24 for movies, 1080i60 for TV dramas, and 720p60 for sports. A true 1080p TV would seem to be the best way to watch all that.
But it is certainly true that crappy 1080p TVs are still crappy.
What about HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, what resolution are they and how will they look on 1080p screens?
Blu-Ray supports 1080p at 30fps. That's a good enough reason there.
What about HD DVDs ? I think the BluRay format will be able to handle 1080p bandwidth. That doesn't mean that discs will come out with that format but it'd be worth checking and consider that possibility.
WMV HD DVDs also do 1080p (granted, there aren't many titles)
Also monitors are more and more connected to (media) computers, like Windows Media Center systems, and 1080p for that would be worth.
One can expect upconverting (HD)DVD players and other devices that will output 1080p as well.
Sony has 2 sets coming out this month that have HDMI in; 50" and 60" SXRD's for $4,000 and $5,000. Not exactly cheap, but not $30,000 either.
1080p? Most people dont even have HD TVs, and right now HD takes six times as much bandwidth for the same quality picture; except that there are more dots. Seriously, I would rather have broadcast TV not look like a low quality pirate DVD first; then focus on increasing resolution.
If nothing else this whole thing illustrates how badly HDTV has been packaged and rolled out to consumers. Higher-resolution screens will eventually win out in the market, you can get a crappy 37" 1080p Westinghouse or Vizio for $2k now.
I tested this out the other day, went to my local Fry's store and I was viewing a KCET(PBS) 1080i transmision on a 1080P and a 720P Mitsibishi HDTVs side by side; and there was a huge difference in the saturation of colors and details that the TV was probably upscaling to its 1080P resolution.
I am convinced that even that the transmision quality isn't there yet, the upscaling compensates for it.
1080P is on my purchasing list this Xmas.
Um, 720p has the *exact* same number of pixels as 1080i
720p is 1440x720 (which is 1036800 pixels)
1080i is 1920x540 (which is 1036800 pixels)
The new Sony SXRD sets do NOT support 1080p over HDMI, or any other input, that's one of the big downsides about them. They are a 1080p set, but they upconvert everything to that resolution, they have no way to take a native input of it.
Also, nothing so far has said that BluRay can do 1080/30p. Everything that I have seen so far has said 1080/60i as well. I'd prefer 1080/24p so I could use a scaler to do everything native inside, but that's very unlikely as well. Then there's the point that most HDTV cameras don't have the full resolution of 1080i, it's more like 1440x1080i instead. However, none of this stops me from wanting 1080p when I get a front projector. For right now, a 720p plasma will work.
Why not get a 1920x1200 PC monitor for less than $1k?
You could change the tuner/decoder as easy as any PC component, when the time comes.
Or do I miss anything?
NJ on the article, I have a hard enough time trying to describe the difference between screen size and screen resolution to the average what not.
A very well thought out article, perosnally I have always dug 720p...
-Stray
Some people like sitting farther away than 14 inches.
Someone wrote that 720p and 1080i is the same number of pixels.
In actual fact, the 1080 in 1080i is there for a reason. It's 1080 lines, not 540. So 1080i is 1920x1080 = 2073600, i.e. twice as many pixels as 720p.
I think people are confusing content resolution with panel resolution. Panel resolution is almost always worth it. When you add more pixels, lower resolution content actually looks better scaled up than if you had exactly the correct number of pixels. The reason why? When we scale up, the scaling algorithms interpolate the pixels that don't exist. For instance, if you double the resolution, you can get a final image that looks better than if you just filled each source pixel into four destination pixels. In effect, the blockiness of the source content gets less and less as you add output resolution. You can really see this effect when you play a low-res avi file full screen on your computer. It doesn't just blow the pixels up, it interpolates what the pixels are in between. Of course, if you do this wrong, the upscaled image can look like crap, due to introduced artifacts. But that is a whole different subject. The main thing is that more pixels will give you a smoother looking image, even if the source material is of low resolution--given a good scaling algorithm.
--Brad
19: but it only refreshes every other scanline each frame. Making the resolution 1920x540. Or if you want to look at it another way, it's 1920x1024 with half the framerate (30fps vesus 60) as 720p
In life you have to make a decision. To get the cheaper kind or to pay for the top of the line. If you wait a few years the top of the line one will be the cheaper kind and there will be a new top of the line one.
This article was great, infact I didn't realize the difference between 720p and 1080i. Thanks!
720p is 1280x720.
But it's not just the number of pixels that matter; it's how you use them. 720p60 has more temporal detail but less spatial detail than , say, 1080p30.
I always thought 720p was 1280x720@60 full frames a second. And 1080i was 1920x1080@30 full frames per second or 60 fields per second. Am I wrong?
#21
No flat panels will update every other scanline. 1080i is always displayed as 1080p. Panels are progressive, period. The way that you go from 1080i to 1080p(deinterlacing) makes a huge difference though. If you just shove the lines together, it will look like crap everytime there is horizontal motion (jagged comb looking things on edges) Instead, there are a whole slew of deinterlacing schemes...
many movies are filmed only at 24fps, so taking a 1080i movie and deinterlacing it properly will leave you with 30fps of 1080p-- perfectly suited. and if you had good hardware, im sure you could even synthetically knock the fps back up to 60 again.
i do agree that with time, 1080p will become much more popular. Already this last month has shown a wave of new TVs coming out with 1080p for somewhat cheap.
Unfortunately, there are some errors and omissions here.
720P broadcast does not provide 60 progressive frames; it provides 30. 60 720P frames, and most certainly 60 1080P frames, would be way too much data for the pitiful broadcast standard approved by the FCC. The upper limit on the data rate is 19 megabits, which is lower than the data rate on a standard-def DV camcorder tape. Yes, MPEG-2 compression is more efficient than DV, but most broadcasters aren't even delivering 19 megabits; it's more like 10. That's attempting to deliver "HD" at the same data rate as a regular DVD. No wonder it looks like dog crap.
Broadcast HD is a fraud thus far, and the fraud is spreading to other products. Now we have HDV, a video format that inexplicably doesn't always even use the full tested 25 megabit capability of a mini DV tape. JVC, who invented this sorry format, selected 19 megabits as the cap. I asked a JVC rep why in the world they would throw away 20 percent of the tape's data capacity, and he said, "Well, 19 megabits is the broadcast standard!" HUH? What does that have to do with anything? With that logic, bands throughout the last several decades would have gone into the studio and recorded their albums on cassette tape, because "that's the standard delivery medium!" Stupid.
More fraud: Even the professional HD equipment is not giving you full HD resolution. Sony HDCAM is supposedly 1920x1080, but in reality it's only recording 1440x1080 (which is probably where poster #16 got his wrong info). And Panasonic's 720P VariCam is even worse: You don't get 1280x720; you only get 960x720. Give me a break. You're getting a whopping 240 more pixels across than SD. Sad. The VariCam does, however, always record 60 full 720P frames per second; that's why it's called the VariCam. It achieves what appears to be variable frame rates by simply varying the delivery of those 60 frames.
Also, the assertion that 30 FPS is insufficient for sports is not true. Far more important is shutter speed, which can be as high as the light level allows. In fact, 30P is usually cited as being superior to 60 1080i fields for sports, which is probably why ESPN is one of the few networks to deliver 720P. There should be no place in a modern TV standard for interlace, just as there should be no more 29.97 frame rate.
And here comes a so-called HD DVD standard, but if you do the math, you'll find that the data rate is still going to suck. And it will suck in a grandiose manner if HD-DVD prevails over Blu-Ray.
The sad fact is that displays and fidelity could be better than ever, but there's no content to play on them. Even music is being systematically destroyed by the record companies' asinine push to make it sound "louder." Dynamic compression is destroying music, and data compression has destroyed video (in addition to adding insult to music).
You can pay thousands and thousands for these devices, but you can't escape the fact that there's nothing to play on them.
720p is 1280x720 (921,600 pixels)
Wow, David Gurney is not a happy person.
Anyhow, I think people (and myself included) sometimes get caught up in the minutia. 1 million pixels, 2 million pixels, who the hell cares? You already do not have the choice of resolution, you are stuck watching that show as the broadcasters send it. Want 720p NBC or CBS? Too bad, they only broadcast in 1080i.
I think either one looks pretty damn good, but sports look much better in 720p. I watched the NBA playoffs on TNT in 1080i and fast action would often get pixelated. The NBA Finals on ABC were 720p and much smoother.
The big story is that HDTV looks much better than Standard Definition. Let's not all get our panties in a wad over pixel counts, I would much rather just watch the show and move on with my life.
1080p/30?
Yeah, 1080p/30 exists. And it is better than 1080i/30. But there is no ATSC standard for 1080i/30. 1080i is 1080i/60. 1080i/60 is superior to 1080p/30 in every way but the ability to do freeze-frames.
To number 28: ESPN is 720/60p. That's why ESPN looks better in motion. Not because 30p is better than 60i, but because 60p is better than 60i.
To the poster above me, the problems you saw with 1080i were not due to 1080i, they are due to poor encoding, or sifting/combing by your cable carrier/DirecTV. With a good encoder, 1080i wouldn't be more block than 1080i, just perhaps have more motion artifacts.
Sifting/combing is when a carrier removes some of the data in a signal in order to reduce the bandwidth required for the signal. Cable carriers, DirectTV (and presumably Dish) all do this to save on bandwidth. Combing causes significant blocking, much more than the signal would have had if it were encoded at the lower rate to begin with, let alone at the higher rate fed into the comber.
OTA (over the air) channels (networks received by an antenna in your house) usually look better than cable/DTV/Dish feeds because the channels can use their full 6MHz bandwidth and have no incentive to reduce it further. Except...
Some OTA channels multiplex multiple feeds onto one line. NBC often does this to add useless weather channels, a local PBS affiliate runs 5 standard-def channels during the day and 1 standard-def and 1 high-def channel at night.
Anyway, get hold of some good content, and you'll see the difference. In particular, watch CSI (Las Vegas) OTA on CBS (which uses 1080i and doesn't multiplex) and you'll know what things can look like when done right. CBS golf coverage also looks great.
I have a 1368x768 RPTV right now and it looks great. I've seen true 1920x1080 sets, and the difference is not astounding. I'd love to have one, but most people should probably save their money.
Content quality is usually the limiting factor right now, not your 720p set. I mean, everything would have to look as good as CSI does in 720 right now before having a better TV would make things look better. And most things don't look nearly that good. Lost is lousy, Prison Break is lousy, and anything on the WB looks so bad you wonder if it is really HD at all. FOX used 852x480/60p last year for sports coverage (think NASCAR) and it looked a lot better than this stuff on the WB which is ostensibly 1280x720/60p or 1920x1080/60i.
Kentobean is correct to the enth degree.
You can piss and moan about this crap till
you have a stroke. It won't change a thing.
These companies are going to steam roll these
machines on us. They've been doing from very the beginging. Oh and if you don't like how the content providers provide don't view it.
I'm not going to buy one of these things until the price is reasonable, just like DVD players. All of you seem too wrapped up on Pixel, line and I vs P. How about the color, black level, gamma ect. I was just curious is anyone wondering as to when we shall see CMYK used instead of RGB? Is it just me but I find three colors too limiting, don't you?
Just putting in my two cent.
CMYK vs RGB?? You are kidding right? Unless you're planning on printing each and every frame on paper...Take a minute to look up the difference between additive and subtractive colour...
I'm in the UK. My home in NZ. 720p vs 1080i or whatever is just not happening where I am.
But the comments on 720 vs 1080 resolution for games are way off base. Of course 1080 is better than 720, just like 1600x1200 is better than 1280x1024, just like 5 megapixels are better than 4. The difference between SD and 720 may be larger than the difference between 720 and 1080 - law of deminishing returns and all that - but there will still be a definite improvement.
Both 1080i and 720p look great. I have an lcd and as well a 50" HD CRT.
To be honest though, my next purchase will be 1080p only (SED, PDP, DLP or LCOS). Overall though, my CRT has the picture around. I've seen HD content on my lcd, on other fixed panel displays (of the 720p variety), and while good, my CRT always has the edge. The big downside to CRTs though is the space they require and convergence issues. It's year two since the purchase of my CRT and it seems to drift more often now.
Sports IMO look better on my CRT.
At the end of the day though, go with your eyes. People will argue numbers and specs all day.
I agree with part of what Kent Gurney (#28) said, and that is FCC has set a pitiful standard. When FCC was setting the resolution standard, it limited the resolution to what can be effectively carried over over-the-air bandwidth. I ask why? FCC should've done their homework and realize only about 30% of the viewers get TV signals from over the air (the rest get it from cable or satellite). These 30% who use roof antennas or (gasp) rabbit-ear antennas would be the last group of people to upgrade to HDTV. So, why cater to them?
Instead FCC should've mandated HDTV standards to the cable and satellite industries where they would've been able to set a higher resolution standard (i.e., 1080p). The cable and satellite customers are also earlier adopters of technology (in relation to the rabbit-ear antenna folks) so the HDTV adoption could have been taken place sooner.
Finally, cable and satellite company can implement better compression technology with relative ease as they become available (i.e., MPEG4) and cram in more HDTV material. All you need to do is switch your cable/satellite box. This is something that's not possible with over-the-air broadcast (without making the current TVs obselete).
BK
I was thinking about using a 32inch LCD panel at 1366 x 768 16/9 aspect ratio as my "primary display." I'd use a second 19" 1280x1024 flat panel as my secondary "all work" display.
Questions:
1. Do bog standard Nvidia and ATI cards support 1366 x768 resolution?
2. Since my laptop does not have a DVI port, I'll be going through a VGA to DVI adapter to get signal to the TV... Any problems there?
3. If I splurged and went for a 50" 1366x768 new-type plasma and used that as my screen, would I be looking at "barn doors" all day? (This is the 50" I'm thinking about - http://www.jr.com/JRProductPage.process?Product=4051479. Supposedly uses subpixel processing. Full specs are not on HP's site)
Any help would be appreciated.
Well woah I agree with much of gurney and the article. I just recnetly bought the 37" Sceptre 1080p LCD TV. IT works pretty nice, esp for computer use. I mean playing games in 1920x1080 and using it at a monitor at that res is amazing. And at 37" it's the perfect size for me. The included tuner is nothing special But HD is indeed better than SD but not as good as people try to tout it out to be.
Kent
you might to read up on this link.
http://www.mavromatic.com/archives/000297.asp
To heck with the PS3, I want to hook my 'puter up and play World of Warcraft @ 1080p60!!
Thru digital please (DVI->HDMI), not analog.
Perhaps someone can point out sites where it's possible to learn the facts.
For example, if a fixed pixel device is displaying 1080i, is it "scaling" (if that's the right word) the source information or is it buffering alternate scan lines? (Of course, this might be true for some products and not others.)
Also, why slow down to the pace of the bureaucrats; why not take any storage device capable of storing and communicating 1920x1080x30fps? Perhaps there's already a Firewire standard capable of that kind of bandwidth so we don't have to fiddle with "yet another would-be standard" or end up spending more money on pairs of HDMI 1.x cables to connect an otherwise cheap game console to a display that would otherwise be just a big panel of 1920x1080 (or more) native pixels. Then all we need to spend money on is the stuff that makes the picture enjoyable (colour, motion) and pleasing to the eye.
It seems that from the early days of technology, we have built systems to "work around" limitations. Surely, with the technology idling way while I type (dual core processor, gigs of RAM, RAID0 at the ready) surely there's enough spare technology capabilities to drive a home theatre with at least the same technology driving my state of the art "Media Center HD" at the resolution of the video card and the display instead of at a standard imposed by broadcasters wanting to save on infrastructure?
Could someone please explain why so many HD TV
sets are built with 1366x768 resolution instead of
1280x720? Wouldn't picture quality tend to be better
with a standard format? 768 guarantees that every
source has to be scaled by some weird factor, while 720
scales at 2:3, 1:1, or 3:2 from the standard formats.
I can't believe that a few more pixels could make up
for that. Is this a triumph of marketing over common
sense, or am I missing something important?
In reference to poster #32, I disagree that any interlaced format is better then progressive scan. The fact is that interlaced formats are horrible for modern day LCD, plasma, and DLP HDTVs. Interlacing was invented to take advantage of the way the electron gun works in Cathode Ray Tube devices. Furthermore, unless you have a very expensive deinterlacer or "tricky" deinterlacer (converting to 540p and screwing you out of resolution) you will end up with pixelated results on these TVs with 1080i formats.
Interlacing is garbage, and should be banished along with the 29.97 NTSC framerate. The US formatting standards are ass-backwards compaired to the rest of the world, thanks the the clueless and useless FCC.
The ONLY reason that interlacing is used in HDTV is so the broadcasters do not have to use twice as much bandwidth as they currently do to get the content to us. The HDTV standards need to inforce prograssive scan formats only. Otherwise I'd have to agree with poster #29, that "HD" is thus far, a scam. 1080i downconverted to 540p and upscaled to 720p is a lossy process, and not Hi-Def!
LenW, The 1366x768 resolution scales the same as 1280x720, with an effort to get more pixels in there. I agree that it is a strange format, but it should scale the same, since both formats scale at 1.78:1.
There is some weird conversion of 720p that happens with these sets, but it is still a linear conversion I believe.
I have some questions to ask. I recently purchased a 26" widescreen crt hdtv (Samsung TX-R2678WH). Now, it says it supports 480i/p, 720p, and 1080i. I think it just upconverts the 720p to 1080i. Not sure if it matters for the situation, but it also has a built in tuner. On Xbox 360, if a particular game comes out that only supports 720p, will it upconvert said game to 1080i or downconvert it to 480p? I would assume Microsoft would think that a fair share of people with HDTVs have a CRT (which usually only support 1080i and not 720p natively) and that they would have 720p AND 1080i for most xbox 360 games. The reason for my concern is that I tried one of my 720p xbox games on my tv and it looks like it downconverts to 480p. What I want to know is if that is the fault of the xbox for not properly upconverting or is it my tv that's at fault? (Sorry for all the questions, lol)
Oh yeah, thanks Randall:
"Interlacing is garbage, and should be banished along with the 29.97 NTSC framerate. The US formatting standards are ass-backwards compaired to the rest of the world, thanks the the clueless and useless FCC."
SO RIGHT. I forgot to include that in my rant.
Sorry newbie question - can I ignore vertical resolution for a second? isn't it better to have a 1920x1080 native panel so I can display the 1920 horizontal pixels that come with a 1080i signal? if I have 1280 or 1366 horizontal panel resolution I'll always be losing 30% of horizontal resolution no?
29: "And here comes a so-called HD DVD standard, but if you do the math, you'll find that the data rate is still going to suck. And it will suck in a grandiose manner if HD-DVD prevails over Blu-Ray."
That all depends on how common the usage of advanced codecs such as AVC/H.264 becomes. If you use one these new codecs correctly, you can get a great picture even with low data rates. Heck, you can even stuff almost 2 hours of high-quality HD content onto the EXISTING highest-capacity DVD using H.264 compression.
The big question with HD-DVD will be whether the image will be stored as 1080i60 with filtering (bad) or as native-sourced 1080p24 (good). BluRay has already announced it will store film-based content as 1080p24.