Slashdot Mirror
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.
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)
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?
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, 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.
-- This sig for rent.