Resolution specs: are they inputs or outputs?

While navigating through a local warehouse retail center this weekend, I couldn't help but sneak away from the shopping cart and scurry down the electronics aisle. It was an HDTV mecca with no less than 20 different television models, all at rock-bottom warehouse pricing.

Savvy shopper and HD addict that I am, not a single model escaped my roving eye. After all, even though the prices were extremely competitive, you still have to ask yourself, "What am I getting for all that dough?"  Like all of you other techno-shoppers, I already had a good idea what screen size and native resolution I should get for my hard earned money. (You all scour the web every day for the best HD deals like I do, don't you???).

I bypassed some of the smaller models simply because our household already has a 27-inch full-screen HD and a 34-inch widescreen HD, both of which are CRT- (cathode ray tube) based units that support full 1080i outputs. This brought me to the larger projection units. You know, the 50- to 65-inch monsters that are much thinner than my CRT behemoths. Read on after the jump for my observations on the sneaky specs.

The problem is: while the DLP and LCD
televisions are much thinner, most of the units on the market are only capable of 720p, or 720 horizontal lines displayed in a progressive format. See, I'm a 1080i kind of guy. I actually tried to get "1080i"
on my automobile license plate, but the state I live in wants a few more characters on the plate. Horizontal resolution of 1,080 lines is just pure bliss and provides twice as many pixels as a 720p picture.
Sure, the 720p provides all 921,600 pixels at once, but the 2.1 million pixels of a 1080i picture just rocks my eyes.

Imagine my surprise when I saw a $2,000 name brand 50-inch LCD unit advertised as "480p / 720p / 1080i". OK, so does that mean the unit can display 1080i? The manufacturer has a "1080i" logo on the bottom left front of the TV, so it must output 1080i, right? BZZZ...wrong answer, thank you for playing! I validated the specs on the manufacturer's home page and sure enough, the native resolution of the unit is 720p, meaning a 1080i input is converted to a 720p output.

There is a growing trend of this occurring, so if you're in the market for an HDTV, check the specs. Both the manufacturers and the retailers need to stop misleading customers by trying to wow them with big resolution numbers. Moral of the story: decide which HD resolution looks best to your eyes and then find the unit that can output that resolution.