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When is 720p Not 720p?
Henning Hoffmann writes "HDBlog has an interesting entry about many home theater displays.
Home theater displays around the resolution of 720p (most DLP, LCD, and LCOS displays) must convert 1080i material to their native resolution for display. No surprise there. But many displays do this by discarding half of the 1080i HD signal, effectively giving 720p viewers an SD signal - not watching HD at all! "
Home theater displays around the resolution of 720p (most DLP, LCD, and LCOS displays) must convert 1080i material to their native resolution for display. No surprise there. But many displays do this by discarding half of the 1080i HD signal, effectively giving 720p viewers an SD signal - not watching HD at all! "
This sounds like the visual version of what Creative Labs has been doing for YEARS with their Sound Blaster audio cards. With most other cards if you want to record with a sample rate of 44.1 khz, you record at 44.1 khz, but even with the newer Sound Blaster cards it must be resampled to 48 khz first.
It doesn't matter if you are sampling up or down, resampling is bad, your best b
et is to find a device without it, or if it is necessary like in this case, the one that does the best conversions.
If I bought one of these displays I would be pretty pissed, but I doubt there is much that can be done about it, if you COULD do something than companies like Creative Labs would be out of business.
No surprise there. But many displays do this by discarding half of the 1080i HD signal, effectively giving 720p viewers an SD signal - not watching HD at all!
The HD signal's still there... you just have to learn how to read between the lines.
Here is tfa for you...
When is 720p not 720p?
Tom Norton, in his coverage of the Home Entertainment expo, brought something up that I was unaware of.
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. But, Silicon Optix claims that most manufacturers do the 1080i conversion just by taking 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. (Aside: Tom Norton mentions this in his review of the Screenplay 777 projector.)
If this is indeed the case, most people with 720p (or similar) projectors (and most DLP, LCD, and LCOS home theater projectors are exactly that) are not seeing what their displays are capable of. They're not, technically, even watching HD. This is crazy! How can this be? Why haven't we heard of this before? How are manufacturers getting away with it?
Over-reacting? Well, if you're an owner of a 720p (or any similar resolution) projector you're either gonna be really upset by this or you're just gonna be laisez-faire about it because there's nothing you can do and you're enjoying your projector just fine thank-you. But me, I don't even own any such projector and I'm a little ticked. But I guess I should really wait for evidence of how properly-done conversion looks in comparison before making any snap judgements. I'm sure that the people selling HQV (a processor chip that does it the RIGHT way) will set something up.
To me, this is a serious issue. Comments are welcome.
from: http://www.hdblog.net/
There's got to be a fairly straightforward formula relating inherent resolution loss when performing any noninteger upsampling, or any downsampling. Any other change in resolution must necessarily degrade the signal, yes? (Except perhaps if a clever algorithm could losslessly encode the original data in a 1.5x-upsampled version, without distorting it.)
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Is there any way of telling which sets do this? This is certainly something I'd like to know before I dropped that kind of cash.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
A Home Theater PC with good quality parts, drivers, and decoders will preserve the 1080i signal - it will combine the 1080i field pair into a single 1080p signal, and then downconvert (ie. downscale) to 720p.
As a reference, my Athlon XP running at 2.4 GHz (aproximately equivalent to an Athlon XP 3400+) with a Geforce 6800GT and TheaterTek 2.1 software will have (little) trouble achieving this, assuming the 1080i source isn't glitchy itself.
Alternative is to use the NVIDIA DVD Decoder version 1.0.0.67 ($20 US after 30 day trial) and ZoomPlayer 4.5 beta ($20 beta or nagware) for similar results.
TheaterTek is roughly $70 US and includes updated NVIDIA DVD Decoders - too bad NVIDIA hasn't updated their official DVD decoders with the bugfixes that is present in the TheaterTek package.
When the un-washed masses can't actually tell the difference (they can't even see DCT blocking) and you can get away with selling this crap to them..
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I have a 720p projector paired with a 110" screen. Both 720p and 1080i material look fantastic. Maybe the supposed degredation would be visible side-by-side with a native resolution projector, but I certainly wouldn't worry about it based on what I've been watching.
get nemulator
I had the same line of thought, that if you just use an HTPC and a monitor that can display data from that (like a projector) then you are all set - as long as whatever feeds HDTV into your HTPC for display is properly doing the conversion. That would be interesting to know, how are current HDTV cards for PC's doing any scaling? I guess they just dump the ffed to disca and then it's up to the players, which hopefully use the great horspoer of a PC to scale properly...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The article says: Sure, you'll get the full width of the 1080i resolution, but you're only getting half the height.
Except your 720p display will hopefully have a horizontal resolution of 1280. 1080i video has a horizontal resolution of 1920. So, you're keeping half of the vertical (1080 lines to 540) and you;re keeping 2/3rds of the horizontal (1920 down to 1280).
Ouch.
When I upgrade to an HD idiot box, I plan on sticking with tried-and-true CRT. IMHO, you can't beat the picture quality/price, and I have yet to hear a compelling reason to fork out thousands of dollars for the trendier offerings.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Early adopters often get slapped in the face. I've been thinking about buying an hdtv for a long time. I'm really glad I read this before I bought one.
You can tell I'm an aries because of my ram.
This is what you get when you buy a "major" appliance without doing your research first. I know if I was planning on dropping anywhere from $700-to over a $1000 on something, I would be sure to find out everything about it so I could make an informed decision. If someone didn't do that, then they got what they deserved.
That said, I'm sure there a lot of people out who "don't care". It works form them, and that is all they care about.
I'm very responsible, when ever something goes wrong they always say I'm responsible.
If the broadcast is 1080i, and your display isn't 1080i, I don't think it's logical to assume the quality of the downsampled video will be equivalent to a true 720p broadcast.
When I get around to buying a HD television (not any time soon, I do all my televisioning on my computer), it will be a true 1080i (are there 1080p televisions?) display so I'll know I'm getting the full potential of HD.
Unless I'm strapped for cash, of course, in which case I'll just suck it up and know my 720p won't be the best thing for watching 1080i content on.
On the plus side, it's important to get the facts out there for the consumer, who will likely (although not logically) assume he's/she's getting more than they really are.
Why not submit a link to the original article, rather than a link to your blog, which consists only of a link to the original article?
Otherwise, people might assume this is a shameless attempt to draw traffic to your site.
From my lurking on HDTV enthusiast sites, sometimes the broadcaster will take DVD content (480i) and upconvert to 1080i! It's a terrible practice.
And in other instances, the broadcaster will not use the full resolution - what looks like 1920x1080i may actually be an upconvert of 1280x1080i, 1440x1080i, or 1280x720! And then there is the overcompression - taking a 20mb/sec mpeg2 stream and cutting the bitrate in half - compression artifacts galore.
It is sad when HDTV programming available in North America can be WORSE than the DVD!
You never know what you get in US (and other?) HDTV broadcasts. My understanding is that only the Japanese use minimal mpeg2 compress - I saw snippets of Contact (with Japanese subtitles) in full glorious 1920x1080i at the maximum 20 mbit/sec bitrate - and it was glorious!
Ok, here's the skinny. 1080i is 1920x1080 @ 59.94 fields / second, meaning at any one instant in time, you're looking at a 1920x540 image made up of every other line of the picture (the odd fields, if you will.) Then, ~1/60th of a second later, you see the even fields. 720p is 1280x720 @ 60 FRAMES per second, meaning at any given instant you're looking at EVERY field of the image...not just the odd or even fields. If you were to try and take all 1080 lines from the original signal, they wouldn't really map properly to 720 at any given second because half of data would be from that same ~1/60th of a second later. Scaling the fields up is really the best way to go, at least for stuff that's been shot interlaced.
And when you use it to upsample data, it is a lossless encoding that doesn't degrade the signal (unless you deliberately throw away data - discrete Fourier transforms are also used in lossy encoders).
It's not a distortion-free transform, since high frequency signals (e.g. sharp edges) in the original image get interpreted as smooth changes and can get blurred between multiple pixels in an upsampled signal. But then again, that's exactly the sort of thing that happens when you digitize a picture in the first place - if you have a sharp black/white edge that passes through the middle of a pixel, the most accurate thing you can do is make that pixel gray.
I haven't had a chance to read through the full article/blog/whatever yet (I'll do that at lunch), but this sounds like something I noticed over the weekend while browsing the Best Buy site. Companies are now producing ED-compatible TVs. They list all sorts of compatible display modes (1080i, 720p, 480p, etc), but then mention that they downscale them for display on the TV. Is this just some way of offering half-assed support to unsuspecting consumers?
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Manufacturers better refrain from selling not HD capable displays as HD displays. This is clearly false advertising and there have been several succesful lawsuits lately where people who have been stupid enough and bought into this got their money back.
There's got to be a fairly straightforward formula relating inherent resolution loss when performing any noninteger upsampling, or any downsampling.
Its a bit messy. Imagine 1080i image with a 1-pixel wide sloping black line that is nearly horizontal on a white background. If you throw out half the data, you create an image with a dashed-line. Gaps in the line occur where the slanting line cut across the rows that were discarded. If you upsample from 540 to 720, you will find that the remaining dashes become fattened non-uniformly. In places where the row in the 720-row image falls directly on top of the 540 row image, the line will be thin and dark. In places where the 720-row image falls midway between rows in the 540 row image, the line will be wide and less dark. The end result is the thin black uniform line is converted to a dashed line of varying thickness and darkness -- not pretty.
Even if you resample directly from 1080 to 720, you still run into problems where the 720-row image pixels fall between the 1080-row pixels. At best, you can use higher-order interpolation (e.g. cubic) to try and fit a curve through the original data and try to estimate what was in the middle of the pixels so they can be shifted half way over. But the result wil never look like an image that was taken with a 720-row camera in the first place.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
There has been a similar issue for years with audio amplifier specs.
Mfgrs usually tout their amps with having "200 watts of pulsing music power" which usually means 100 watts per channel peak. In reality it's more like 70.7 watts/channel RMS (assuming they're not still lying).
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
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This is not particularly news. Some "blogger" discovers something because he never bothered to ask and screams something about the sky is falling.. I'm kind of sick of this "news" reporting. Incidentally, this same issue affects owners of most plasma and LCD tv's with native resolutions below 1920x1080 too.. depending on how you look at it as a problem or not.
Anyway, it's fairly well known that the internal scalers in many devices suck. That is why there is a market for good external scalers. If you are paranoid about watching a lot of 1080i on your 720p projector or LCD TV or Plasma, go buy a scaler. They cost about $1000 but will improve scaled display a lot.
At least if you have an external scaler you will have some options about how you convert 1080i to 720p. The article makes it sound like splitting the fields is a huge sin -- and it is if you discard one field per frame (Half field deinterlacing), but it's perfectly acceptible to scale EACH 540-line field to a seperate 720-line frame and double the framerate. This is called bob deinterlacing and is often the best for converting 1080i video to lower resolutions. If you are watching a 1080i upconvert of a film or something, though, you can have the scaler do full field deinterlacing and inverse telecine for you and see a nice 720p/24fps picture. Scalers also generally have internal audio delays for various types of audio feeds so you won't have to worry about AV sync issues either.
If you have any questions about how your device does this, you should try to find out before you buy it. Most devices don't publish how they do it, though, so your only option may be to derive it -- and that will not be an easy job.
If you're looking to get into HD there are a *lot* of little quirks to take into account, such as:
- Offically there are two HD resolutions, 720p and 1080i
- Most HD TV's are only capable of *one* of these resolutions. So you have to choose, 720p OR 1080i in most cases. If you want one that can do both, check very carefully.. forget DLP or LCD based devices (fixed set of pixels so fixed resolution), CRT only.
- Many HDTV's will *not* convert from one format to another. They accept only their native resolution.
- Different networks broadcast using one standard or the other. For example CBS uses 1080i and ABC 720p IIRC. Fox is way behind in HDTV support.
- Most HDTV receivers can handle either a 720p or 1080i signal and will convert as required for your TV's native resolution.
- Some TV providers only support one format, regardless of the source material. Ie, in Canada Starchoice only broadcasts in 1080i. Any 720p content they have they upconvert to 1080i before broadcasting. It's impossible to receive a native 720p signal from them.
- The Xbox supports both HDTV modes... but very few HD games actually use 1080i (Dragons Lair being one). Most are 720p. So if this is important to you, you'll possibly want a 720p native TV: most receivers do not have HD inputs that would let you upconvert a 720p game to a 1080i signal for the TV. (the new Xbox will have more HD content than the current one, but it's a good bet that they'll be mostly 720p titles)
- Most Projectors and Plasma's are *not* HDTV. They are EDTV (enhanced definition) or some such. Check the specs carefully.
- Most projectors are 1024x768. This means your HD signal of 1920x1080i or 1920x720p is being heavily rescaled horizontally! Few projectors have a true HD native resolution.
So there you go... lots of fun things to take into account!
Blockwars: free, multiplayer, head to head Tetris like game
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
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I work on this stuff, every day.. all day.
only cheap projectors or displays have a maximum res of 720p.
I dont see many of those anyhow.
but yes, on those displays the signal is downconverted by chopping out 1/2 of it.
however, these displays are not popular anyhow.
some of the most popular displays still cant display native, but they are still can display either XGA or SXGA with no proble (were getting pretty close to hd at this point)
dont buy a cheap projector, and you wont get a cheap display. you get what you pay for.
Every HD source I've ever used, from over-the-air tuner to satellite receiver to upconverting DVD player to HTPCs, have a selectable output on their side
If you receive an OTA broadcast or cable signal in 1080i then you don't have any control over the video source. Since the broadcasters are split between 720p and 1080i this is a real issue.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
That's not why the Soundblaster Live sucked. Resampling to 48Khz before DAC conversion is the standard way to operate a DAC. The problem was that the resmpler was BROKEN in the Soundblaster Live!-series of cards, resulting in significant, audible distortion in all but 48Khz sound signals. That, and the DAC just wasn't all that good even taking that into consideration. The drivers were awful too.
The results may be one of the following:
You will get a screen full of tiny, shimmering horizontal lines that shift in the center of your screen Congratulations! Your HT gear is showing a true 1080i picture You will get a full screen of gray, possibly with a line in the center Not bad, your gear is properly downscaling the signal Half your screen is black, the other is white Uh oh. Your gear is taking the easy way out and dropping half the scanlines to downconvert (Bele and Lokai) I call that the Cheron Test.Comment removed based on user account deletion
My goodness, there's a lot of idiots out there.
The whiners in TFA mistakenly assume that 2 fields of 1080i = 1 frame of 1080p. This is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.
It cannot be assumed that the following field has anything to do with the current one. See the "not resized or deinterlaced" picture here:
http://www.100fps.com/
When the television takes the 540 lines in a given field, interpolates the missing lines, and scales to 720 lines, it is DOING THE RIGHT THING. Otherwise your TV would look like the first two example pictures at the above site.
Nathan
The company saying this is Silicon Optics, who makes the Realta scaler chip (featured in the $3,500 Denon 5910 DVD player), and is obviously trying to get people to use their chip, or buy a scaler based on their chip. Now, from the reviews I've read of the 5910, it's the best reasonably priced (under $10k) scaler on the market. It's amazing. However, when they say "Almost all other companies throw away this extra data and do it the lazy way" without naming the companies, I believe them as much as I believe those recent Apple benchmarks.
I'm almost sure their scaler will help with most sources you feed your 720p HDTV, what it can do with 480i DVD's is impressive enough that you would believe that. However, I doubt the problem is as bad as they say it is. Also, 1080p DLP sets are going to start hitting the market soon, and in a couple of years 720p will probably have been pushed out of the market mostly. Given what a scaler costs, I'd probably save my money to get the 1080p set in a couple years since the 720p sets still look great.
I have a 1080i set, but I considered a 720p DLP set since they looked amazing and only didn't because of cost.
You can usually go into your cable/sat box and tell it what to output. If you de-select 1080i as an output format it will do the converting to 720p instead of the TV which should give better results. It's amazing how many times I've seen the cable guy screw up HD installs. They'll have the tv and the cable box stretching the picture which cuts off the edges.
If you're a real quality nut like me then get a tube based HDTV, they can actually get close to doing 1080i.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
Yep, I have the same thing. The reason, I believe, is because even dropping down to 540p before upscaling to 720p leaves you a LOT more information than standard NTSC. First of all, NTSC is 480i, not 480p---so really it's reasolution is somewhere between 240p-480p due to the losses incurred by interlacing. And secondly, 1080i content has only 540 lines of chroma resolution anyway; you're really only losing luminance information. (Not to minimize that---luminance is the most important component---it's just that we're losing less that you might initially think.)
If you've ever seen high-def on a 480p EDTV plasma, you'll understand just how superior the picture STILL is compared to 480i NTSC.
Nevertheless, true 1080p deinterlacing is coming down the pike right now. Faroudja, SiliconOptix, and Gennum have all created solutions, and we should begin seeing them in external video processors and displays soon.
That's fine advice until you realize that at this point in time there is NO source of 1080p material. Sure, you can scale up to it, but then you're interpolating, and you're not really seeing true 1080p. It's nice to own a unit that can display 1080p natively, but it might be a while until we get a native source for it. You're damn right about the tubes in a CRT though. Those suckers are expensive to replace, compared to replacing a single bulb in an LCD or DLP projector. It cost me three times as much to replace the CRT bulbs in my Pioneer RPTV, compared to the single bulb in my Runco projector.
Did anyone notice that, despite the accusation, Silicon Optix calls out NONE of their competitors for this supposed "issue"?
Gennum, Pixelworks, Genesis, Oplus (now Intel), and several others make their own scaler/deinterlacer chips. Most of these have already found their way into displays and have proper deinterlacing strategies in them. Nobody scales without deinterlacing first anyway in a modern image processor.
Silicon Optix's technology is based on offline film processors by Teranex. While they can certainly be high quality, they aren't the top of the heap either by volume or by prestige. Genesis/Faroudja had a name for a long time with their "line doublers" which are over 20 years old and their more advanced but cheap gm1601 is one of the more popular solutions for HDTVs. Gennum's GF9350 with VXP technology is currently in the largest plasma tv in the world (Samsung 80"). These and other scaler/deinterlacer chips have none of the problems that Silicon Optix claims exist. If you look at the debates that rage over at the usual enthusiast sites, you'll see that there are issues with its own technology like latency and cost that aren't present in the other solutions I mentioned.
Just like Silicon Optix's "odd film cadence technology" which requires nothing different than what everyone else has today, this reeks of a cheap PR vehicle. While the choice of scaler and deinterlacer is important, it is not the utter tragedy that SO would like to make it out nor are they the saviors of the HDTV world. If they know who the culprits are, then let them name whose image processor it is that creates these problems.
We all know that the 100W at 0.08THD in an 8-ohm load at 100-10,000Khz is the far superior amp.
You don't care much for bass, do you? And most people find it difficult to listen to ultrasound all day.
Oh, this was going to be great. Fidelity like you never had it before. No scratches. No groove wear. Dynamic range you won't believe. Crystal clear highs. Thunderous lows, with no rumbling feedback even if sat your player on your speaker.
Remember the little logos? AAD? ADD? DDD was the best you could have (digital recording, digital mastering, and (obviously) digital media in your hand). And a lot of hard work on the part of the engineers operating the mixing boards. It's that last part that costs time and money. Now, all the equipment is digital. So, it's all great, right? Sorry--the technology is not the limiting factor in sound quality anymore.
The limiting factor is apathy. Most people can not really hear the difference. And fewer people care.
Exactly the same thing is now happening in video.
Since we can't improve the functionality (well, we could, but you'd never notice). It's pure hype from here on out.
Now, where'd I leave that case of speaker spikes and green markers? Gotta get 'em up on ebay; David Hannum was right.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Mfgrs usually tout their amps with having "200 watts of pulsing music power" which usually means 100 watts per channel peak.
I call this the Radio Shack method of describing the system, because it was originally used only by Radio Shack, but now is used by everyone -- the system power is described as the sum of all channels, not the value of one channel.
As such, I have a 420W sound system in my living room that, 15 years ago, would have been described as 70W. More likely, it would have been described as 70/70/70--70W main, 70W surround, 70W subwoofer (yes, it is a small system, but fully appropriate to the room).
On the peak/RMS issue, good amps give RMS and have peak listed on the specs page. Sometimes the peak exceeds the typical sine-wave ratio of RMS=.707*peak because not all sounds are sine waves. My previous amp was a good example. It was listed as a 60W (per channel) amp at 8 ohms (15W surround, no sub, no center) but could, according to the specs page, deliver 120W on a peak to the main channels. This system was replaced last Decmber after 15 years of service. Coupled with a set of Harmon-Kardon speakers, it rocked pretty hard.
www.wavefront-av.com
I have seen pros and cons on how these sets do their sampling. Here is my advice -- go look at the picture on a set with a good HDTV source. Use the specs as a guide but don't trust them. Get what looks good to you. My father would never have been able to see anything more than the quality of a good DVD. He couldn't see the difference between crappy digital cable and DVD. Some people like me are so manic about visual quality we will devote huge amounts of time tweaking our systems. While my system is probably limited to about 1500 lines of resolutions due to the lenses, I find its image much warmer, uniform, and pleasing to the eye than the pixilated look of some very high-end flat screen solutions that go for 10-20k.
About the only thing that really shows how good HDTV can be is material that is shot originally with HDTV video cameras. Upconverting film inevitably introduces a softness that is exaggerated by systems like mine. For now you can only see a few things on the Discovery Channel and a few musical events in true HD (meaning not upcoverted from film). I mention this because while I advise you to go see for yourself (if possible) most stores don't really offer a good enough HD signal to display the difference. If you can hold out a little longer I would wait until either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray players hit the shelves and then demand a demo with these HD sources to make a decision.
One final note, I haven't noticed that 1080i hasn't had as much comb-artifact during motion as I would have expected, but there still is a noticeable blurring during camera pans (maybe this is just combing in disguise). I'm sure I will get a little boast in quality when I can play off of a true 1080p source. If I were to design the next generation of video recorders I would introduce variable framing rates in playback. The picture being refreshed as high as120fps, but the actual picture updates depending on need for frames to eliminate motion blur. About motion blur, storing 120fps would be inefficient and overkill. The system I propose would make true frames at like 30-60fps, but as the camera moves, the edges would be scrolled in as needed to keep a smooth fluid motion. A really intelligent system might be able to also track one or two moving objects across this field and give them higher frame rates as well. At 2 mega pixels, I think we need to retrench and try to slay motion blur before going onto higher pixel counts.
Letter To Iran
Back in the day, on the Atari and Amiga, you could actually do stuff in that interrupt time. The most common thing was to swap display buffers for double buffering. This made for rock steady hardware scrolling, an effect that still lacks somewhat in today's PC's, believe it or not, as there was absolutely no tearing of the display whatsover. Just a beautiful effect.
This is my sig.
My DLP monitor's native resolution is 720p. Before purchasing the unit, I read up about signal, conversion, interlacing, etc. The conclusion I reached is that my monitor should do one thing and do it well. That one thing is to display a picture at its native resolution.
Almost everything I've read notes that the deinterlacing hardware in most TV's flat out sucks. My solution? I bought a Samsung DLP sans ATSC tuner. My TV is a display, nothing more. Had I been able to, I would have purchased it without the NTSC tuner as well. Buying the tuner separately affords me the opportunity to buy a better quality piece of hardware without the redundancy of having purchased the same hardware in my monitor.
I'll deliver a quality 720p signal to my monitor, and it will display the picture. What's more to ask?
Incidentally, the image is further compressed by
--
I totally agree with the the idea of your post, but the actual practice is a bit different.
First off, DVHS and HDTV PVRs exist in tiny numbers. I am not one of the guys who owns one. Neither are the vast majority of the people reading your post. It's a great idea, but a bit of a stretch to ask someone to purchase equipment that costs half a grand minimum before even going out to purchase their first HDTV. Once again, great idea, just not something very many people are going to be able to take advantage of.
Ok, number two: think of the specialty shop in your area that has a wide variety of HDTVs set up and ready to plug your box into. Having trouble? Me too. All of the specialty shops in my area have, at best, half a dozen sets. This is pretty far away from variety. I'm not trying to knock these guys. I bought my speakers from a specialty shop and got a good deal on some great speakers. I love those guys. But their monitor selection was pathetic, just like every other "home theater" shop I've actually walked into in my area. Are you _ever_ going to be able to see the actual display you're interested in, or just something fairly close?
Finally, what about Best Buy with your own content? Well, this is a problem too. A big problem. Let's say you showed up at BB with your own source material and you happened to find the one guy in all the BBs thoughout the land that was very knowledgeable, very friendly and didn't mind at all walking around with you answering your questions and helping you set up your PVR to every box you were interested in. Well, what about the sets? How are they calibrated? Have they ever been calibrated? Did they set that CRT down hard and screw up the guns? Have they been showing their plasma monitors at full brightness for 12 hours a day for half a year? Are those dead pixels typical of the manufacturer or unique to that one display? To put it succinctly, when you go into that menu and choose the defaults for the display you're interested in, how do you know that those defaults are typical of the box you're going to open up at home? How do you know if the set next to it is just as bad, or actually much closer to factory defaults?
I know, you can glean a lot by looking at the displays, but it's far from the only place to look. Even good sets will often look like crap at the big box store. I hate to say it, but this is one place where stats will often paint a better picture than the picture you see in front of your eyes at the store.
TW