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PS3 Scales 1080i To 480p On HDTVs
Dr. Eggman writes "According to an article from IGN, PS3 owners are finding that 1080i-only HDTV sets are scaling down launch games to 480p. The scale-down occurs because the launch games do not support 1080i, however they should be scaling down to an HD resolution of 720 instead of 480p. It is unknown if this is a technical or software issue and if it can be patched soon." ABC news is reporting that a patch which should be available to PS3 owners soon will correct the backward compatibility issues we discussed the other day.
Hint: the reason it's called '1080i' is because there are 1080 lines, not 576, and they're interlaced.
480p should be enough for anybody.
The summary completley mixes up the resolutions involved. The problem occurs when a game supports 720p but not 1080i and the TV supports 480i/480p/1080i (but not 720p) as many older HDTVs do. In this situation, the PS3 doesn't scale the game's 720p to 1080i, but rather forces the game to output 480p. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, uses a chip in the hardware to scale the 720p from the game to 1080i for the TV. Any TV that supports 720p won't have this problem. Neither will games that can output 1080i.
To state it clearly:
Some PS3 launch games outputs at 720p
Lot of 2-3 years old HDTV cannot display 720p, but can do 1080i just fine.
But the PS3 is incapable of upscaling the game's graphics to 1080i. (unlike the xbox 360 for example)
Hence, the only display available for them is 480p.
To sum up : buy PS3, hook up to HDTV, play in 480p. (some games, some TV)
1080i is 1080 lines of resolution, they're just not all refreshed in the same frame. The resolution of the stream is still 1920x1080. I don't know where you got 576 from, but even if you're talking about one field of a 1080i stream then it's 540 lines, but there's two of those every 30th of a second. So no, if you have a TV that isn't 1920x1080, then you'd want 1280x720 - not 640x480...
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No, the problem is that they don't support 1080i. The PS3 should be scaling from 720p to 1080i (which the 360 does), not 1080i to 720p.
The issue here is that older HDTV's only support 480p, 480i, and 1080i - not 720p. This is all stated very clearly in the article.
I know that commentors don't seem to read the articles on Slashdot, but shouldn't the submitters?
What do consumers do about patches if they have no internet? At least with PC gaming, you can download a patch somewhere else, burn it to a disc, and run the patch later. Will consoles allow updates via some sort of hard copy install?
On a CRT set, this may be the case. AFAIK, all fixed-pixel displays must internally convert a signal progressively before displaying it. Thus, a 1080i signal (1 frame of 540 lines sent 60 times per second) is internally interlaced to generate 30 frames of 1080 lines. Native progressive signals (480p, 720p, 1080p) provide the full number of lines 60 times per second, thus providing more natural-looking motion. This is why (IMHO) sports look better in 720p than in 1080i, despite the additional lines of resolution available in 1080i (which are essentially thrown out on any non-1080P capable TV, since they typically only have ~768 lines of resolution).
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The 360's scaling is done before the signal is converted to analog. Anyways, if this was actually the problem, Sony could have just made the PS3 only capable of scaling up to 1080i on analog outputs. I don't know of a single HDTV out there with digital inputs that doesn't handle 720p, and there's no question that for games it's better to use 720p than 1080i.
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All three consoles appear to allow patches, none of them have said they won't allow it (I assume Nintendo isn't going to go the extent the other two are). But this is a horrible thought. Forget QA, forget everything else, we're just screwing people over because if they get a game early they are screwed, we don't even need to finish the game because we can always patch in more later? Patches should add information, not fix bugs that shouldn't have gotten out of the shop. Patches are good but not if every game needs a patch out of the box.
We also have Microtransactions from all sides. EA is selling us cheat codes over the marketplace for money, People are selling tutorials? I thought Micropayments were going to save us? Not make us feel like tools.
Then assume patches and micropayments are OK (They arn't). What happens 10 years from now, you find a unused Console start it up and put in your game, xbox live is probably not going to be serving the data so you can't get the updates? What happens if you don't have an internet connection? You can't get the fixes. So we are bending people to our will even more now? (first HD and now almost necessary internet)
All this just makes me, a gamer, feel like Next Gen is just a pile of crap that is just out there to bring the computer to a console. I applaud Nintendo but even there they are doing parts of this stuff to an extent.
No. 1080i is 1080 lines interlaced. That is, each frame of 1080 lines is divided into two fields, odd and even, each containing 576 lines. All the odd lines are presented to the display first, followed by the even lines. Displays that use this as a native format are usually CRT screens where there is an electron gun that scans across the screen lighting up the phosphors continuously. Interlaced signals work fine for these types of displays, but for a non-scanning display such as a flat-panel display or a digital projector, an interlaced signal must be deinterlaced first to produce a single frame with all the lines appearing sequentially. There can be complications with this, so what is better for these types of displays is to have a progressive image to start with.
Oh yeah, 1080i can be better than 720p, for example if you have a 1080i native CRT. On the other hand, if you have a 720p-native LCD or plasma TV, the 720p image can probably look better. On the other hand, I have a 852x480 progressive plasma display which does a better job at handling a 1080i signal than it does at handling a 720p signal, at least from my hd cable box. Go figure. I also have a 30" Sony CRT TV. It's got an awesome picture, but the screen isn't so big and the thing is very large and weighs about 200 pounds.
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Kindly put, the HDTV formats are (in descending order of quality): 1080p (1,920 x 1,080 pixels progressive scan), 1080i (1,920 x 1,080 pixels interlaced), 720p (1,280 x 720 pixels progressive scan), and 480p (720 x 480 pixels progressive scan).
There's some question as to 1080i vs 720p in quality, and I have never heard of a 720i or 480i (although I see no reason why they might not exist).
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So what were the launch issues and bugs with the 2600, the NES (remember, their big issue came well after launch), SNES, TG16, Genesis, Gameboy, Jaguar, Saturn, N64, Dreamcast, or Gamecube?
Can you name launch issues with even two or three of the above?
Most appliances work. Gaming consoles used to be appliances but the more they veer towards being general computing machines and the more they veer towards working with a wide variety of hardware, the more they veer towards having hardware and software issues. But for the record, most consoles DON'T have some kind of issue or bug at launch. Most of them work just fine at launch.
No, you're mistaken.
Sure, it only shows 540 lines "at a time", but the next 540 lines are not the same 540 lines, but the ones in between the previous 540 lines, making up the full 1080 line display. Your eyes don't work fast enough to see that one is off while the other is on, and the chemicals on the inside of the CRT keep their "glow" long enough to minimize or even eliminate flicker. Non-CRT sets, like dlp/plasma/lcd/d-ila/sxrd work a little differently and showing interlaced footage in a progressive manner can lead to visible "combing" unless the set de-interlaces, but I won't go into that here.
1080i has 1080 lines of resolution, but like your old standard definition television, it refreshes every other line alternately. So, the first half of the refresh mode (1/60th of a second) refreshes lines 1,3,5,7 etc (fields a) and the other half refreshes lines 2,4,6,8 etc (fields b). So that while it refreshes 60 times a second, it only shows you 30 full frames.
720p conversely, shows you 60 full frames of 720 lines in sequence, per second.
If it's shot at 1080/30p, it still gets broadcast as 1080i, and you still see 30 full 1080 line frames per second.
If it's shot at 1080/60i, it gets broadcast as 1080i, and you see 60 "half-frames" per second, because the movement of the subject changes between fields a and b.
If it's shot at 720/60p, it usually gets broadcast as 720p, but some stations only broadcast 1080i regardless of source, in which case each set of 720 lines would be interpolated to 60 full frames of 1080 lines, and then only half of each gets broadcast. Still looks great, but it's not as detailed.
If a station broadcasts at 720p regardless of source, it gets a little complicated. 1080i sources are basically converted to 540p and bobbed (fields b are moved up one line so the image doesn't shake up and down), and then gets stretched to 720p. It retains all the information of the 540 lines, but doesn't have as much detail as 720 lines, obviously. Now, if the 1080i source was shot 1080/30p and gets broadcast at 720p, each frame needs to be downsized, and then repeated, to make up the missing 30 frames from the 60p signal.
Additionally, if a movie comes in a 1080/24p source, it gets broadcast either as 1080i with 3:2 pulldown, or it gets broadcast as 720p with 2:3 frames (3:2 pulldown repeats fields, 2:3 frames repeats frames) in order to bring it up to 60 fields (for 1080i) or 60 frames (for 720p).
Confused yet?
It's not that hard when you understand why it is the way it is.
In the case of the PS3, it's pretty lame that 720p gets converted down to 480p, but since it's a slightly simpler process (1 full frame = 1 full frame vs. 1 full frame = 2 half frames), I can't really blame them for using it on the launch games.
I have an older CRT HDTV that only does 1080i/480p/480i and can't do 720p, so of course I'm disappointed, but all good things to those who wait.
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480i is just called either NTSC or SDTV, which is 480 lines interlaced. This is why you never hear it refered to as 480i. The whole naming by scan lines (ie: 480p, 720p, 1080i/p) is a reletively recent phenomenon since EDTV (480p) only came out about 10 years ago, and called for a new naming system.
720i does not exist, to my knowledge. By the time they got to the 720p standard, there was no reason to go interlaced anymore, because progressive scan will ALWAYS be superior in image quality when showing in a native format. Now, there is a bit of question as to whether 1080i or 720p is superior. I would say 720p is a safer bet, because interlacing causes a lot of weird flickery effects, and I would be totally up for sacrificing some screen resolution to get rid of those.
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