5.1 DTS guy said:
Thanks for the information, yeah I was looking at that Sony 60 inch also. Can you (or anyone for that matter) explain the main differences between I and P (like 1080i and 1080p)? I initially thought that 480i was the standard resolution for CRT tvs, and it then progressed to 720i, then 1080i, and then 420p, then 720p, and finally 1080p. Is this how it works?
The base number is the number of lines the TV will display (or the broadcast will send.
480i is the standard for generic TV and analog broadcasts. The "i" stands for interlaced... what that means is that the TV is refreshing the even lines on one pass, and the odd lines on the next pass. This leaves half the old picture on every pass. It takes an S-video cable to get that quality. A composite cable is less than 400 lines of resolution.
next to come along was 480P. The P stands for "progressive". It can be delivered over component cables. This process refreshes both even and odd lines at the same time, so there are no hold-overs between frames. It significantly improved the picture.
the next one to come along was 1080i on broadcast TV, which is the half-and-half at twice the resolution. it's fabulous for slow-moving action like PBS specials (cheetah chases being the exception) or golf... The idea of 1080 resolution on a DVD player made the movie companies nervous... if you could send that over component, you could dump it into a DVD recorder, and you might never actually buy another movie. So they made it to where you had to have a copy-protected DVI or HDMI connection for this quality of signal.
then came 720P. It has good pieces from both worlds... It refreshes every time and has 50 % better resolution than 480. Some TV's, notably Sony's use 768 instead of 720, so there's a touch more resolution. 720P is great for all action sports and only a mild compromise on the slow moving stuff. 720P is much smoother than 1080i, just not quite so blindingly sharp. I don't really remember ever seeing a 720i. 720/768P is, of course, also copy-right protected and requires DVI or HDMI input from an unpscaled DVD player.
Note here that DVD's are actually only recorded as 480i. The DVD player is writing in the lines at the same time to get you 480P. The DVD player does even more work with the 720P, using algorithms to smooth the spaces between the 480 actual lines of information.
The Holy Grail of the whole industry is 1080P... maximum resolution, maximum smoothness. It's still in the future. You can buy a TV that does it, but not a DVD player or anything to send that quality of signal to it. Someday, the second half will catch up, but for now, no one even knows what kind of connection you would need to get 1080P into the TV. So buying a 1080P TV now does not guarantee you will be able to use it with the new players.
And then it would have to be recorded in a 1080P format.
And then we would all be in video nirvana...
there's probably a couple of minor technical inaccuracies in the whole story, but it should explain where we are today.
