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1080p, Human Vision, and Reality
An anonymous reader writes "'1080p provides the sharpest, most lifelike picture possible.' '1080p combines high resolution with a high frame rate, so you see more detail from second to second.' This marketing copy is largely accurate. 1080p can be significantly better that 1080i, 720p, 480p or 480i. But, (there's always a "but") there are qualifications. The most obvious qualification: Is this performance improvement manifest under real world viewing conditions? After all, one can purchase 200mph speed-rated tires for a Toyota Prius®. Expectations of a real performance improvement based on such an investment will likely go unfulfilled, however! In the consumer electronics world we have to ask a similar question. I can buy 1080p gear, but will I see the difference? The answer to this question is a bit more ambiguous."
If you do the math you come to the conclusion that the human eye can't distinguish between 720p and 1080p when viewing a 50" screen from 8' away. However, 1080p can be very useful for much larger screen sizes, and is handy to have when viewing 1080i content.
Maybe you should educate the morons of tomorrow so they'll stop believing the leaders of tomorrow. - Dogbert
There's still not much available in the wild that does 1080p justice right now anyway. Horribly compressed 1080p looks every bit as awful as horribly compressed 1080i/720p.
Consider many people can't distinguish between a high definition picture and a standard definition picture warped to fit their HD screen, this question seems largely academic.
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Last I checked, other then HD/BR DVD players, and normal DVD players that upscale to 1080p, there are no sources from cable or satellite that broadcast in anything other then 720, so its kind of a moot point. I have heard rumours verizon fios tv will have a few 1080p channels in a few months, but nothing substantial... and last I checked, there boxes do not do 1080p (I could be wrong about the boxes statement though)
:(
I have a series3 tivo though, which only supports up to 1080i
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
I, for one, will not be happy until I have an IMAX theater in my home. That requires way, WAY more resolution than 1080p. And you can see the difference for sure.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
If you lean into your honey for a kiss, she doesn't get all pixellated when you get close to her face.
When you press your face up against your HDTV panel, you should be able to tell the difference between 1080p and reality.
If you can't tell the difference between the two, then you might want to get your eyes checked.
I can throw as many stones as I wish; my house is made of transparent aluminum.
In other words, your mother was wrong. You're better off sitting CLOSER to the TV.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
After all, one can purchase 200mph speed-rated tires for a Toyota Prius®. Expectations of a real performance improvement based on such an investment will likely go unfulfilled, however!
;)
But it does mean that the performance of the car won't be limited by the tires...
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My "real-world" conditions may be a 50" TV seen from 8' away.
Another person may watch the same 50" set from 4' away.
Your kids may watch it from 1' away just to annoy you.
2 arc-minutes of angle is different in each of these conditions.
Don't forget: You may be watching it on a TV that has a zoom feature. You need all the pixels you can get when zooming in.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If you lean into your honey for a kiss, she doesn't get all pixellated when you get close to her face.
Consider your target audience...
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
You're still on that? I'm on 3240z, it's higher def than real life.
Consumers should really only care about noticeable improvements in displays. This means that when you're watching the screen, the resolution is not hindering you from viewing the important details in the image, such as someone's face. Clouds, for example, may not matter. When it comes to video games, text on the screen such as your health will be more important. For example, have you ever played a game on an old TV set and you can't even read the text? It's times like that where you can really see the difference. In many situations though, getting that better resolution display just isn't going to matter.
1997 vintage RCA CRT TV.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
According to the linked text, the "average" person can see 2 pixels at about 2 minutes of arc, and has a field of view of 100 degrees. There are 30 sets of 2 minutes of arc in one degree, and one hundred of those in the field of view, so we get: 2 * 30 * 100, or about 6000 pixel acuity overall.
1080p is 1920 horizontally and 1080 vertically at most. So horizontally, where the 100 degree figure is accurate, there is no question that 1080p is about 2/3 less than your ability to see detail, and the answer to the question in the summary is, yes, it is worth it.
Vertically, let's assume (though it isn't true) that only having one eye-width available cuts your vision's arc in half (it doesn't, but roll with me here.) That would mean that instead of 6000 pixel acuity, you're down to 3000. 1080p is 1080 pixels vertically. In this case, you'd again be at 1/3 of your visual acuity, and again, the answer is yes, it is worth it. Coming back to reality, where you vertical field of view is actually greater than 50 degrees, your acuity is higher and it is even more worth it.
Aside from these general numbers that TFA throws around (without making any conclusions), the human eye doesn't have uniform acuity across the field of view. You see more near the center of your cone of vision, and you perceive more there as well. Things out towards the edges are less well perceived. Doubt me? Put a hand up (or have a friend do it) at the edge of your vision - stare straight ahead, with the hand at the extreme edge of what you can see at the side. Try and count the number of fingers for a few tries. You'll likely find you can't (it can be done, but it takes some practice - in martial arts, my school trains with these same exercises for years so that we develop and maintain a bit more ability to figure out what is going on at the edges of our vision.) But the point is, at the edges, you certainly aren't seeing with the same acuity or perception that you are at the center focus of your vision.
So the resolution across the screen isn't really benefiting your perception - the closer to the edge you go, the more degraded your perception is, though the pixel spacing remains constant. However - and I think this is the key - you can look anywhere, that is, place the center of your vision, anywhere on the display, and be rewarded with an image that is well within the ability of your eyes and mind to resolve well.
There are some color-based caveats to this. Your eye sees better in brightness than it does in color. It sees better in some colors better than others (green is considerably better resolved than blue, for instance.) These differences in perception make TGA's blanket statement that your acuity is 2 pixels per two minutes of arc is more than a little bit of hand-waving. Still, the finest detail in the HD signal (and normal video, for that matter) is carried in the brightness information, and that is indeed where your highest acuity is, so technically, we're still kind of talking about the same general ballpark — the color information is less dense, and that corresponds to your lesser acuity in color.
There is a simple and relatively easy to access test that you can do yourself. Go find an LCD computer monitor in the 17 inch or larger range that has a native resolution of 1280x1024. That's pretty standard for a few years back, should be easy to do. Verify that the computer attached to it is running in the same resolution. This is about 1/2 HD across, and 1 HD vertically. Look at it. Any trouble seeing the finest details? Of course not. Now go find a computer monitor that is closer to HD, or exactly HD. You might have to go to a dealer, but you can find them. Again, make sure that the computer is set to use this resolution. Now we're talking about HD. Can you see the finest details? I can - and easily. I suspect you can too, because my visual acuity is nothing special. But do the test, if you doubt that HD offers detail that is useful to your perceptions.
Finally, n
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Beauty is in the eyes of the watcher.
...depending on how old you are. I think the concern was associated more with X-ray radiation emissions from CRT televisions, and older ones at that (prior to the introduction of the Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act of 1968). I would fathom to say that most of us on this site are too young to have been plopped in front of a TV that old for large amounts of time.
I recently saw an article posted by Secrets of Home Theatre, very well known for their DVD benchmark process and articles.
The article is here.
They show numerous examples of how the processing involved can indeed lead to a better image on 1080p sets. Mind you it is not just the resolution, but how 480 material being processed and scaled can look better on a 1080p screen than on a 720p (or more likely 768p) screen. It is a very interesting read. Although if you are already conversant in scaling and video processing some of it can be very basic. I count that as a feature though as most non-technical people should be able to read it and come away with the information they are presenting.
Definitely interesting as a counterpoint.
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seeing as everybody i know watches 4:3 content stretched on their 16:9 screen i think most people wouldn't care.
and to be honest, nothing on tv is worth broadcasting in HD. doesn't really add anything.
ok perhaps its worthwhile for a nude scene but other than that, i don't watch telly thinking "i wish this had better resolution". i actually think "this program is crap"
"'1080p provides the sharpest, most lifelike picture possible.' '1080p
D is pretty possible....
the use of "qualification" in the summary terms mean exception to the claim.
I feel it neccassary to qualify the last word pretty strongly as the biggest "qualification" of that statement.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=QFH
and it does exceed 1080p
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Once someone actually sees the difference, it's remarkably obvious. My father wasn't really buying into the HD stuff (despite seeing it at stores), until I showed him the SD feed of a football game (Ohio vs. Michigan I think), and then the HD. Switching between them, it was instantly obvious the difference. It's much harder for someone to see something at the store, then compare it to something they have at home.
I'd rather see an improvement in the compression technology used for the HD signals. Ever see a HD demo video with fast motion? Sometimes the parts of the screen containing fast motion get really blocky (especially if the colors are relatively dark). It looks crappy, but most people don't notice. There is a rollercoaster demo they use in the stores that I notice blocky patches in every time i see it.
But it does mean that the performance of the car won't be limited by the tires...
Very true, but I believe there is an expectation that the delivery and display of signal(s) will continue to improve so that the capabilities of the new gear can be realized; we don't have the same expectation of the highway infrastructure, at least in the US. (We don't have enough physical or visionary room for wholesale upgrades.)
The resolution of current televisions will eventually become a limitation. The Prius will likely never use the full capacity of 200mph tires.
PS Dear Toyota - please prove me wrong.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
A much better use of the bandwidth (and cost) would be higher frame rates and a much larger dynamic range. Panning shots on a large screen look awful, as do dark parts of an otherwise bright scene.
If you use your HDTV as a computer monitor, definately.
One of the nice things about the Mac Mini is that it will drive a 1080p signal right out of the box: just hook up a DVI cable or a DVI->HDMI cable to that shiney HDTV and go to town.
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Having worked in the high-end DTV and image processing space, our rule of thumb was that the vast majority of people will not distinguish between 1080p and WXGA/720p at normal viewing distances for up to around a 37"-40" screen UNLESS you have native 1920x1080 computer output. It only costs about $50 more to add 1080p capability to the same size glass, but even that is too expensive for many people because of some of the other implications (i.e. more of and more expensive SDRAM for the scaler/deinterlacer especially for PiP, more expensive interfaces like 1080p-capable HDMI and 1080p-capable analog component ADCs, etc.). These few dollars are not just a few dollars in an industry where panel prices are dropping 30% per year. Designers of these "low-end" DTVs are looking to squeeze pennies out of every design. For this reason alone, it'll be quite a while before you see a "budget" 1080p panel in a 26"-40" screen size.
At some point, panel prices will stabilize, but most people won't require this either way. And, as I mentioned, very few sources will output 1080p anyway. The ones I know of: Xbox360/PS3, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray and PCs. All broadcast infrastructure is capable of 10-bit 4:2:2 YCbCr color sampled 1920x1080, but even that is overkill and does not go out over broadcast infrastructure (i.e. ATSC broadcasts are max 1080i today). The other thing to distinguish is the frame rate. When most people talk about 1080p, they often are implying 1080p at 60 frames per second. Most Hollywood movies are actually 1080p but at 24fps which can be carried using 1080i bandwidths and using pulldown. And you don't want to change the frame rate of these movies anyway because it's a waste of bandwidth and, if you frame rate convert it using motion compensated techniques, you lose the suspension of reality that low frame rates give you. The TV's deinterlacer needs to know how to deal with pulldown (aka "film mode") but most new DTVs can do this fairly well.
In other words, other than video games and the odd nature documentary that you might have a next-gen optical disc for on a screen size greater than 40" and for the best eyes in that case, 1080p is mostly a waste of time. I'm glad the article pointed this stuff out.
More important things to look for in a display: color bit depth (10-bit or greater) with full 10-bit processing throughout the pipeline, good motion adaptive deinterlacing tuned for both high-motion and low-motion scenes, good scaling with properly-selected coefficients, good color management, MPEG block and mosquito artifact reduction, and good off-axis viewing angle both horizontally and vertically. I'll gladly take a WXGA display with these features over the 1080p crap that's foisted on people without them.
If you're out buying a DTV, get a hold of the Silicon Optix HQV DVD v1.4 or the Faroudja Sage DVDs and force the "salesperson" to play the DVD using component inputs to the DTV. They have material that we constantly used to benchmark quality, and that will help you filter out many of the issues people still have with their new displays.
I used to get teased about using outdated technology by members of our local photo club who shoot crop-factor digitals and project digitally, until I brought in my 6x6 projector and put some images up on the screen.
This has bugged me for awhile.
Many TV manufacturers have been pushing 1080p. They have even showed images of sports and TV shows to show off their TV's great picture. However, the fact is that it is very unlikely that anyone will be watching any sports in 1080p in the near future in the US. Television content producers have spent millions upgrading to HD gear that will only support 1080i at the most and 720p as the top progressive scan resolution. They are not likely to change again to go from 1080i -> 1080p to benefit the few folks with TVs and receivers that support 1080p. As others have pointed out, 1080p isn't even supported by the HD broadcast standard.
The only sports you will seen in 1080p will be some crappy sports movie on Blu-ray.
splash $0.02 worth of bleach in your eyes. you'll be more than happy with the old ntsc standard after that.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
1/8 wave or bust!
You're commenting on something which it sounds like you might actually be qualified to comment on! What are you doing on /. ?
Yes, ATSC supports 1080p, and has from the beginning. You idiots who think 1080p has to mean 60p are muddying the waters. Don't you watch DVDs and think they're just fine? They're 24p, doofus. If you can do 60i in 1080, then you can do up to 30p with identical bandwidth. Just read info on the standard instead of the bullshit the 720p proponents say.
Wikipedia article on ATSC
Here is a viewing distance calculator (in Excel) you can use to figure out way more about home theater setups than you'll ever really need.
It has viewing distances for user selectable monitor/TV/projector resolutions & sizes, seating distances, optimal viewing distances, seating heights(?!), THX viability(?!) etc. It's well researched and cited.
No I'm not affiliated with it, I just found it and liked it.
Question everything
Of course, we are looking at moving pictures, which have different, more subjective requirements. A lot depends on content and "immersion". Many people watch these horribly small LCDs (portable and aircraft) with often only 240 lines. Judged for picture quality, they're extremely poor. Yet people still watch, so the content must be compelling enjough to overlook the technical flaws. I personally sometimes experience the reverse effect at HiDef -- the details start to distract from the content!
People swear that an audio sampling frequency of 192kHz yields more fidelity than 92k. CD audio is 44.1 after Nyquist theorem which says we must take just over 2 samples for the audio frequencies we wish to represent. In the case of CD audio that's 20Hz to 20kHz which is generally accepted as the range of human hearing. A CD sample rate of 44.1 actually exceeds the audible range for most people, if we double it to 92kHz we then exceed the frequency response of human hearing, recording microphones and reproduction systems. Yet there are still those who claim to hear a difference at 192kHz.
The same is true of HD, people claim they see an improvement on their 40" home cinema when the physics say that it's not possible.
It's similar to a religious debate, the true believers on one side and scientific fact on the other. Very amusing
That's because, given a good upscaler, you can't distinguish much difference between DVD quality (which is most people's benchmark of what their SD TV can do) and 720p (which is what most HDTVs show). If by "standard definition" you're talking about crappy, digitally compressed TV channels at lower resolutions, then sure, there's a difference there, though I do wonder how much of the perceived improvement is due simply to using less lossy compression, rather than to genuine resolution improvement.
Even looking at DVD vs. HD, you can see the difference in things like crowd scenes, detailed nature shots, or sports where the players are filmed from way back so you can see the field as well — basically anything where there isn't enough detail in the source material for any upscaler to work with. However, for most things I watch at least, that doesn't apply. There basically isn't much difference in face shots, action scenes set in a street/building and filmed from fairly close in, or most CGI and special effects.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Most "HDTV"s out there are only 1366x768 panels. I've also seen 1024x768. Then you have the odd 1920x1200 monitor, and the occasional 1440x960. So what's the point of discussing 1080i vs 1080p if you can't even display it properly unless you get a so-called FullHD panel? It's all gonna get resized otherwise.
Honestly, I don't know anyone (including myself) who has ever gotten an HD set and then later said "this was not worth the switch".
You can't go around blasting your mouth off about stuff you have not tried. Until you have actually SEEN THE DAY TO DAY DIFFERENCE in shows like CSI and Lost when broadcast in HD vs. non-HD, you're just spouting bullshit.
I won't even go into the difference it makes to have Dolby Digital 5.1 surround on these shows.
It is a totally different viewing experience. It makes you barely even bother watching shows on the SD channels anymore because they are so much worse.
6x6cm is 120/220 sized film. IMAX is actually 70x48.5mm. So each frame is about as large as from my large-format 5x7 camera.
Nitpicking aside, though, I've used the same trick to get digital advocates to stfu. One frame of 6x6 at, say 100ASA—if you were to consider each grain of silver halide to be a "pixel"—and you're talking hundred of megapixels.
Something you've missed is that the very finest in visual quality comes not from being able to resolve the individual pixels but from having several pixels unresolved for each "pixel" in your vision. The point where your eye and the display have equal resolution is just the point at which you start getting diminishing returns for adding extra pixels.
Then you put some SD content on the new uber-TV of doom, and my god it is shit.
Putting 200mph tires on a Toyota Prius is down right stupid. Putting them on my Porsche 928 is not quite as stupid.
The issue with 1080p is not as clear cut though. There are a LOT of factors that you have to put into consideration. 1080p has higher resolution and higher frame rate. Period. It has a much higher resolution. Is this better or not? That will SERIOUSLY depend on what media you are using to watch on the 1080p, and moreover, if you are using a very sharp LCD/Plasma display or not. (My guess is the answer is "yes" for most people.)
One big factor is that these 1080p screens are not very well adept for use with analog material. They can take very precise digital data very well, but converting analog material to digital screens will leave very irritating artifacts. That is, pixels jumping back and forth, which REALLY show up badly in slow scenes or those scenes with next to no motion.
Analog, SD TVs are very good at overcoming these problems. The [i]nterlace and analog construct allows a lot of this to be fuzzed. It can be fuzzed enough that you don't notice it. In that sense, it's not fair to compair 1080p with a tube SD picture. 1080p can NOT fuzz an image. It is not capable of doing so without jumping a pixel, which is noticeable. Software can do the fuzzing, but that will degrade the image.
By definition, Analog can "fuzz" what Digital can't. And most people will notice. Will they CARE is an entirely different issue. I tend to have very good hearing and can tell a GREAT difference between a CD and an mp3/AAC/OGG song. This does not require high-end equipment. I can tell the difference between an Apple Lossless file, and an AAC file from the exact same song on the exact same iPod. But the question is, do I care? The answer is no.
Either way, I think that 1080p is too LOW of a resolution, as long as the screen is digital. You can actually tell the crappy picture, which wouldn't bother you at 1/4 the resolution if it were an analog tube.
But seriously, it's a matter of software medium. Play a DVD on an SD TV (tube) set, and then compare it to S-VHS, and then VHS. You can STILL see the difference, and this article is bickering about the same thing. Been there, done that. 8mm film is awesome, even though it has lower resolution than most digital camcorders these days. A 50 year old soviet made 16mm camera shoot will run circles around 1080p with modern film. So what!?
TA refers to a 44"-wide television at 96" (eight feet).
arctan(22/96) = 12 degrees of the 100% degrees that we've assumed. So the proposed display setup uses 24%, or 1,440 of the 6,000 horizontal pixels that the parent calculated. This is consistent with TA's assertion that 720p is closer to the actual resolving power of the eye.
The assumption of a 50" screen at 96" viewing distance is fair, but you only have to sit two feet closer to see all the pixels in a 1080p display.
(I hope I get rich so I can buy fancy TV equipment some day =D)
If I'm far enough away that my eyeballs are the limiting factor, I want to be able to zoom in on controversial sports plays and cool shots of the starship Enterprise.
Even if my display screen isn't 1080p, my tuner or playback device should be capable of using the full HD signal so the zooms look decent.
For the sake of argument, assume I'm watching a recording or have "record live TV" capability.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I have a 1080i/720p native projector, and a 108" screen. I also have DirecTV's HD service. When I first got everything hooked up, I changed the output from the satellite receiver to test out what the visual differences actually were, or if I could even see a difference.
When I switched from 1080i to 720p, I actually perceived an improvement in image quality... I don't know if it's just my own personal preference, but I think it has something to do with the interlacing. When it's progressive scan, the image looks a ton cleaner. I definitely watch all HD broadcasts at 720p now.
Also, if you're looking into getting anything hi-def, be prepared to accept the fact that standard-definition broadcasts will look like ass from now on... That and the first six months, you'll find yourself watching hi-def programming just because it's hi-def.
Your Wife: "You're watching Guiding Light?!?!"
You: "It's in hi-def!!"
1. The TV doesn't fill your field of vision (it is not a wraparound TV that goes to the peripheral edge of your vision). So no, you can't tell the difference at that distance.
2. Even if you sat very close, the TV is flat, and edges of the TV would be occupy a smaller arc than the centre, so again you can't get the edge resolution.
A 3 foot wide TV at 8 foot distance is just over 20 degrees not 100 degrees. i.e. 1200 pixels. Using your 2:1 estimate that would put the vertical at 600.
If you want to see the "Wow" factor, download the Apple Quicktime Trailers in 1080p and 5.1. I can really tell the difference between my compressed clear-QAM 1080i recordings and these uncompressed 1080p trailers.
Ultimately, we all want affordable full-wall-sized VR so we can have breakfast on the veranda overlooking the scenic world landmark of our choice, don't we?
But, yes, I quickly realized that large panels are for families, business, and people who entertain by showing movies. My wife and I are probably as well served by an inexpensive 22" 1680x1050 six feet from our heads on the sofa than we would be by an expensive 50" of lower resolution on the opposite wall.
I think this is a -very- key point. I went to the store with 'I'm going to buy an HDTV' in my head and got to looking at the sets. After about 30 minutes of comparing, I decided it was not worth the difference.
... err... Discovery HD (TBC because the only reason to turn it on is if you're really bored, or you want to show off the HD) in the stores. It will blow your mind. Why do stores not have displays like this? But even that doesn't bring that 'holy cow, you can see every wrinkle on Bob's face!' that you get when just watching your normal TV shows.
About 6 months later, I decided I wanted the HD set even if it didn't look -that- much better, but this time because I wanted my console to display high def.
I would -never- go back.
TV and gaming are both -so- much better. My dad bought that CRT HDTV from me and I upgraded to an LCD. He now keeps asking when I'll sell that and buy a new one.
Just looking at it in the store is not enough to really see the difference. Maybe if they played The Boredom Channel
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
What you are forgetting is geeks like the shinny top of the line. I mean really, if we can't brag about our gear, what can we brag about. Take that buddy, your TV only does 720p, HA!
. html).
Besides you can always pair your 1080p with this (http://www.oppodigital.com/dv981hd/dv981hd_index
Ohhh Shiny!
I dont have cable or sat but I found some HD broadcasting over the air locally. When I check the info on the signal it shows the image resolution and the audio format. I was surprised that more than a few are 1080p and 5.1
Until it does, why would investing in a $1500+ television be worth it? Does MythBusters really get better when I can see the pieces of food stuck in Hyneman's moustache? Does BSG get better when I can see the battle scars on Galactica or the pockmarks on Eddie's face in full 720p?
The picture quality isn't what makes these shows good. It's the quality of the content. I'd watch them on a grainy black and white set if I had to, and I'd enjoy them just as much. Until I find a compelling reason to spend that much money on a TV, as opposed to a new MacBook Pro, I'm not going to.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Wait a minute, I had no idea BBC also carried a show titled Planet Earth -- I've been watching Planet Earth on Discovery HD for the past few weeks. Are they the same show?
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
This will be an argument for the ages. Just like people still argue over digital vs analog, solid state vs tubes, lossy vs lossless.
There are audiophiles out there that say you can improve the sound quality of a CD by running a green marker around the outside edge.
As long as it's possible to make things better, people will say they can tell the difference. And maybe some can.
There's nothing wrong with anything - Phillip J. Fry
It's pretty much a lame article without 480, 720, 1080, and a real life image for comparison purposes.
Clicky
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
The Toyota Prius is a bad example in this context. Some Chevy or so would have been a better example. I own a Prius and besides being an extremely good car it tops out at 165 mph after some minor modding. What you might want for a Prius such as for most other cars are low rolling resistance wheels. The general concept of one component's performance limiting another one's should be familiar to most of us anyway.
i've been looking at the new 40" and 46" samsung 1080p lcd displays, and the biggest factor in my decided to go with the 1080p over the 720p plasmas is that when connected to my pc i can definitely see the difference in resolution.
What we have today is Scalar graphics, each location on the screen obtains a scalar value (brightness, color). What we need is a vector display (no, not vector like an oscilloscope), where each location fires aimed photons at a perscribed angle. This would result in a virtual window pane (and truly insane bandwidth requirements). In addition to 3d without glasses this would bring true depth of field to the image, you would have to focus further on far away objects than near ones.
Of course, capturing this sort of video would be an entirely different challenge.
I just hit the Tire Rack and could not find a single tire for the Prius that was Z- or better rated, let alone rated to 200mph.
Which tire is submitter referring to? Where would I find them in the stock Prius size (195/55-16) ?
The viewing distance is all-important in determining how much resolution you can actually distinguish. And of course viewing angle affects the sense of immersion. Put the two together and you find that _only_ 1080i/p resolutions produce sufficient detail at the viewing angle recommended for movie viewing. The angle in question is 30deg, as defined by the SMPTE. (The THX standard actually requires a wider angle and thus a higher resolution, which no current commercial home format can meet.)
Here's a link to a full analysis complete with graphs of screen size vs. optimal viewing distance: http://www.surrealsystemsonline.com/SVTVSize.htm
Sure, it's detailed. Too bad the colour is still a poor match to human vision.
We see a huge dynamic range - we can see details in extremely dark areas and still perceive detail in very bright areas. What we see as bright or dark also depends on the surrounding lighting (and not just as your iris adapts, either, there are other effects at work). Even more importantly, our perception of colour intensity and brightness is not linear.
To get truly amazing video, we'd need to switch to exponential format colour that better matches how we actually see and can represent appropriately high dynamic ranges while still preserving detail. We'd also need to dynamically adapt the display to lighting conditions, so it matched our perceptual white-point & black point. Of course, we'd need to do this _without_ being confused by the light from the display its self. And, of course, we'd need panel technology capable of properly reproducing the amazing range of intensities involved without banding or loss of detail.
We're a very, very long way from video that's as good as it can get, as anyone in high quality desktop publishing, printing, photography or film can tell you. A few movie studios use production tools that go a long way in that direction and photographic tools are getting there too, but display tech is really rather inadequate, as are the colour formats in general use.
I call marketing BS.
Back in the Amiga and Atari ST days, game designers who were "all the sh*t" would not release a game that wouldn't run at "full frame rate". Psygnosis was notoriously famous for releasing superb 2D games running at 50 or 60 frames per second (depending on where you lived: Europe and the U.S. didn't have the same framerate and, yup, this influenced gameplay).
As a game and demo addict back in those days, I could tell immediately if it was full frame rate or not. The difference was simply astonishing. Later on, when the PC days came for me, I could tell immediately if a screen was simply -refreshing- at only 60 fps. Very bad flicker, nasty for the eyes. I needed at least 72 Hz for a still background so that it felt good for me.
Yet all the "pseudo-scientist" would say that making a 2D game scrolling run at 60 fps was stupid, for human eyes didn't need more than 24 fps. In this case, I didn't care for their flawed explanations, because I believed one thing: my eyes. So did the good game programmers and the good demo coders.
What is the explanations behind that? I always wondered why so many people had accepted that obviously flawed belief that 24 fps was all that was needed to have a perfect animation (I say obviously flawed because it's a proven fact that a smooth 50 fps 2D scrolling is way nicer and gentle for the eyes than a 25 fps one).
Now I've got to admit that playing Counter-Strike a few years ago I didn't notice much difference above 85 fps... Maybe up to 100, but above that I couldn't see a difference anymore (maybe other people can).
So where's the limit?
There are several problems:
1) The ATSC specs don't provide a 60 frame 1080p mode - only 24p.
2) There isn't a lot of content that can use 1080p - and it is likely to just be movies, which are 24p.
There is one benefit of getting a 1080p display though: MythTV does a good job of deinterlacing 1080i to 1080p. You will probably also want to get some equipment to remove the MPEG artifacts too, which is not cheap.
Mark
one can purchase 200mph speed-rated tires for a Toyota Prius®
Uh-oh. The car analogy taken to a dangerous extreme: we have to specify which make and model now.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Interlaced video has got to go. Interlaced video made sense with analog transmission and CRT tubes which rely on the persistance of the eye and the display itself is interlaced. However, virtually all non-CRT displays are inherently progressive. Doing a good job of deinterlacing video is a very difficult problem, and the results will never be as good as video that is progressive to begin with (the exception being film if the device is smart enough to know that the source material is progressive (i.e. 3:2 pulldown). MPEG encoding is also far more efficient and easier to do if the video is progressive as well, since otherwise it's much more difficult to figure out image motion if it shifts up or down an odd number of pixels (or less). Progressive video also uses less bandwidth. 1080p/30 compresses much better than 1080i/60.
Good deinterlacers for TVs are expensive, and few TVs use good ones. It also introduces a lot of difficulty when trying to scale video since virtually all non-CRT sets also have some fixed native resolution.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
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Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Let's extrapolate that figure into a real-world situation: theatrical movies. SMPTE standards say you should be 2 screen heights back for an optimal viewing distance. For a 2.35:1 movie, that works out to about 60 degrees. That means given the 1 arcminute spacing rule, there should be 3600 pixels across the width of the screen. Most movies these days have digital intermediate work done at "2K" resolution, or ~2000 pixels across the width. However, some are starting to have their work done at "4K", or ~4000 pixels across the width of the screen. What do you know, in a blind test, people invariably pick out 4K material as looking better (see 4th paragraph of link). That couldn't happen if the figure were 2 arcminutes.
It's really too bad this article made the front page of slashdot. People who don't know any better are going to be linking to it for a long time, and I'll have to keep copy/pasting this rebuttal.
Free Hans!
Okay, your eyes can't distinguish dots 2mm wide on a billboard a 1/4 of a mile away. So...
:)
That said, is there a noticeable difference between 720p or 1080i and 1080p. Absolutely...even if only at 4ft away.
Is this an unrealistic distance? No, not really...when I had a 61" TV and a crowd of people be it for movies or Xbox it was NOT uncommon for a bunch of us to be on the couch and chair (8ft+ away), some sitting against the coffe table. And a few lying on the floor 3-5ft away from the screen.
At these distances, said resolution makes the TV viewable or not viewable. In fact, one might argue the higher the resolution the closer you can sit to the TV and maintain enjoyable quality.
An old 320 standard resolution 50" projection TV required nearly 10ft of distance for you NOT to notice the lines. My 61" 1080i HDTV required about 4-5ft. Essentially, 1080p allows a lot of people to crowd around a TV and still enjoy the quality. The 1080p also provides better playback for action (can we say sports, which is probably the #1 reason people crowd around a big screen TV).
So is it a noticeable quality difference. I'd say so...
***
All that said, the quality is noticeably better IMHO for a second reason. When I first saw these in a store I noticed that this one television had a much sharper image than the others. I looked around, and noticed two other HDTVs that looked noticeably sharper than the rest. They were also 1080p.
So without even knowing they were coming to the market I noticed a clear and present difference. I am actually glad that 1080p is being released because I believe that since it's announcement 720p & 1080i will fade away in a few years and 1080p will become the standard. I don't expect anything really beyond 1080p for a while. But 1080p gives the advantage of both 720p and 1080i with neither of the disadvantages. Therefore consumers will eventually choose it over the other. It's like a re-cap of the VHS vs Betamax, but not the is VHSBMX which gives the advantage of both and for minimal economic cost. (Sure, 1080p are pricier than the old resolutions but they are far far less for an initial role-out. You can already get a 1080p for as low as $1,500 if you hunt around.
I don't have a lot of evidence to back this up, but I strongly suspect that the difference has to do with the uneven spread of "pixels" across your eye's field of view. You can resolve things a lot better at the center of your field of vision than at the edges; if you can resolve 2 pixels per minute of arc across the middle 50% of your FoV, then there's probably some portion near the center (but outside of the retinal nerve 'hole') that has a higher resolving power than the edges.
So a small screen, which you'll necessarily be looking at with the sharpest part of your eyes, will probably still look better at a further distance, than you'd think based on the resolution data or experience gathered by looking at large screens.
If you're thinking about large screens that are going to take up 25-30% of your FoV, what you care about is the sort of "average" resolution of the eye; if you're talking about small screens, then you're interested in the maximum resolving power of the most sensitive part of the eye.
Also, I think that trying to simplify the human eye as if it's a camera sensor with 'pixels' may be a bit of a mistake. We don't really understand how the brain takes the raw data coming from the retinal 'sensors' and processes it into the stream of information that we perceive and experience. It could be that there is (almost certainly) a lot of "compression" and "interpolation," going on, and that this compression/interpolation is fine-tuned for things like high-contrast edges and shapes, or fine detail. It might be that there are psychological/neurological factors that could cause your "perceptive resolution" to be higher in specific cases than the measured resolving power (measured by just staring at some lines until they blur together, which I'm assuming is where the lines/arcmin figures come from) would indicate. It wouldn't surprise me if humans are capable of recognizing familiar objects and features even when they're very small, and in theory shouldn't be resolvable.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
adj.
1. Of or relating to a vintage.
2. Characterized by excellence, maturity, and enduring appeal; classic.
3. Old or outmoded.
There was a news piece I read recently where a BBC engineer was interviewed and said their experiments had showed that a faster framerate made a bigger difference to people's perception of an image's quality. They showed a well set up TV at standard res but higher framerate and compared it to a 1080p screen and the former looked better according to the writer. The BBC engineer noted that most of the 'HD is better' was smoke and mirrors anyway because most people's exposure to a normal picture is via a compressed digital feed of some sort and the apparent poor quality is a result of the compression, not the resolution.
I certainly remember being very disappointed with both digital sat and cable images because of the poor colour graduations and sundry pixelation issues compared to my normal analogue signal so I can well believe it.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
that TV truly is for wankers. Get a life.
Besides, cell phones are cheap and have a shorter usable life compared to expensive HD televisions which should last at least 10 years like my Sony SD Tube did. I'd hate to drop that cash in an immature market and be stuck with a TV I don't like for 10 years.
Blar.
Two points on Prius "performance".
1) Electric motors have maximum torque at zero RPM's, so its quick off the line even though you may have to wait for the gas engine to start and rev up before you have full torque for full acceleration.
2) The computer controlled continously variable transmission (CVT) allows the small engine to work at maximum power throughout its acceleration, so there is no lag from shifting and slowing due to inefficient gear ratios. Smooth and constant acceleration which is optimized at all times once the engine is rev'ed up. When a Mustang shifts gears I generally catch up, then they take off again when they hit their sweet spot of their power range. Sometimes it can be annoying (lol) having to take your foot off the gas in the same rhythm as the car in front of you that is having to shift gears. Gas, break, gas, break, gas, break... (no, I don't really drive like that) :-]
One reason...HTPC. I have a HTPC connected to my 56" Sammy. It's only 720p but I would sure love to get a full 1920x1080 resolution for PC use.
Flowing hair is going to cut diaganolly across many pixels and move from pixel to pixel. The more detail presented as a thin hair moves through the field of view, the better your eyes will be able to distinguish it from other hairs and objects, and the picture will look more clear to you.
You don't need to be able to clearly distinguish every pixel for the picture to look better!
(By the way, I still have an old fashioned 32" tube set, so I'm not just trying to convince myself that the bundle I spent on 1080p wasn't wasted!)
Keep passing the open windows...
I see a lot of complaints about the lack of availability of 1080p broadcast. How will you spot the difference between 1080p and properly reconstructed 1080i on modern displays, none of which are actually capable of running in interlace mode.
DLP, LCD, LCD projector, LCOS, Plasma, SED, etc... Are all progressive displays, CRT and CRT projectors are the only interlace display tech that actually runs in interlace mode to the best of my knowledge.
1080i is supposed to have much better flagging for proper de-interlacing than the mess we had on DVD. 24 frame film source should deinterlace perfectly with no complex prediction technology needed.
So what is the difference between a native 1080p signal and a properly de-interlaced 1080i signal. I think you will find it is approaching nil.
I think this is a pretty important point, that most of the electronics manufacturers and content-pushers are ignoring (for the moment).
Pretty much all the content made from the dawn of motion pictures to today, and the majority made today and in the foreseeable future, was made with the assumption that you'd be watching it on a screen that wouldn't fill more of your vision than a typical movie house's screen does. Made-for-TV shows are probably on the assumption that the typical viewer will be looking through something even smaller, so that the director is really framing everything as if the viewer is looking through a small window.
Material made under those assumptions isn't going to benefit much from being stretched across the viewer's entire visual field. In fact, it could probably get downright unpleasant. I can think of some modern TV shows that feature a lot of camera movement, which would probably be pretty sickening to watch on a 100+ degree screen, because they were made for the average household's 32" TV.
What I think has to happen, is manufacturers of big-screen projectors and TVs need to include some sort of 'compatibility mode' where they can simulate different screen sizes by framing the picture with black bars. I would do it by having the user enter their viewing distance from the set (when they're setting up the TV, along with everything else). Then, assuming you're sitting close to it, you could cycle through a number of presets: from IMAX, to traditional cinema size, down to a medium and even a simulated "average TV" size for material that's just too nausea-inducing otherwise. If you wanted to be really slick, on a CRT-based TV or on a projector, you could compress the full resolution and brightness of the imaging device into the smaller picture area (in a CRT, by changing the scan size, in a projector, by zooming the lens); on a LCD TV you'd necessarily throw away resolution. But that would let you watch stuff that was shot with a 4:3 or square, 30" screen, 8' away, in mind in the way it was meant to be watched: as a portal or window into another world, not a panorama that takes up your entire field of view.
It's going to be a while before TV directors and cinematographers start really thinking with HD, and really-big-screen TVs, in mind. Having the majority of your viewers watching your product on a 100-degree screen changes the dynamic a lot; while it brings a lot of exciting opportunities for immersiveness, it also means that you need to be careful applying techniques that may be benign in a "window" format.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This article reminds me of how in the early 486 days, I'd ask about video cards that did better than 8 bit colour, and everybody kept saying, "Humans can't distinguish more than 200 colours anyway!"
Karma: Chameleon (Mostly affected by the 1980s)
What is this a fox news site? Slagging hybrid cars for no reason? Prius cars go as fast other everyday cars in the US. It may not win at nascar but then neither do 95% of car models. Will we be seeing more stories submitted by Brit Hume and other FoxNews Luminaries in the future????
Buy an HDTV and free yourself from the crap cable tv you've been watching. My tv stays on Discovery HD for most the day now. HDNET and INHD offer very compelling HD only programming as well. Like the other poser said...if you would enjoy the shows just as much in black and white then ditch your set. Surely you didn't really mean that. You don't have to try to rationalize your decision to not get an HDTV however that doesn't mean that there is good value in one. Personally, I game on my TV (Xbox360 and PC) which is more than enough justification for most people on Slashdot.
I was in the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) when we invented the popular image format. While I worked for a digital camera company inventing an 8Kx8K pixel (40bits color) scanner, having studied in pre-med college both the physics of light and brain neurology of the visual system. So I'll just jump that line of "scientists" to file this correction.
It's safe to say that only once you've dismissed the scientists who would correct you.
The lockstep TV screen is a sitting duck for the real operation of they eyes & brain which compensate for relatively low sampling rates with massively parallel async processing in 4D.
Joseph Cornwall's mistake in his article is to talk like viewers are a single stationary eye nailed at precisely 8' perpendicular to a 50" flat TV, sampling the picture in perfect sync with the TV's framerate. But instead, the visual system is an oculomotor system, two "moving eyes", with continuous/asynchronous sampling. Each retinal cell signals at a base rate of about 40Hz per neuron. But adjacent neurons drift across different TV pixels coming through the eyes' lenses, while those neurons are independently/asynchronously modulating under the light. Those neurons are distributed in a stochastic pattern in the retina which will not coincide with any rectangular (or regular organization of any linear distribution) grid. The visual cortex is composed of layered sheets of neurons which compare adjacent neurons for their own "difference" signal, as well as corresponding regions from each eye. The eyes dart, roll and twitch across the image, the head shakes and waves. So the brain winds up getting lots of subsamples of the image. The main artifact of the TV the eye sees is the grid itself, which used to be only a stack of lines (of nicely continuous color in each line, on analog raster TVs). When compared retinal neurons are signaling at around 40Hz, but at slightly different phase offsets, the cortex sheets can detect that heterodyne at extremely high "beat" frequencies, passing a "buzz" to the rest of the brain that indicates a difference where there is none in the original object rendered into a grid on the TV. Plus all that neural apparatus is an excellent edge enhancer, both in space (the pixels) and in time (the regular screen refresh).
Greater resolution gives the eyes more info to combine into the brain's image. The extra pixels make the grid turn from edges into more of a texture, with retinal cells resampling more pixels. The faster refresh rate means each retinal neuron has more chance to get light coordinated with its async neighbors, averaged by the retinal persistence into a single flow of frequency and amplitude modulation along the optic and other nerves.
In fact, the faster refresh is the best part. That's why I got a 50" 1080p DLP: the micromirrors can flip thousands of times a second (LCD doesn't help, and plasma as it's own different pros/cons). 1600x1200 is 1.92Mpxl, at 24bit is 46.08Mb per image. 30Hz refresh would be 1.3824Gbps. But the HDMI cable delivering the image to the DLP is 10.2Gbps, so that's over 200FPS. I'm sure that we'll see better video for at least most of that range, if not all of it. What I'd really like to see is async DLP micromirrors, that flips mirrors off the "frame grid". At first probably just some displacement from the frame boundary, especially if the displacement changes unpredictably each flip. Later maybe a stochastic shift - all to make the image flow more continuously, rather than offering a steady beat the brain/eyes can detect. And also a stochastic di
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make install -not war
I'm not sure why we're still getting these articles. 1080p is out now!!! You can just walk into a store and check out the difference for yourself. It's easy to see when you're looking for it, the only question left is would you notice it when you're watching the content not the video quality (enough to pay the extra?)
I've got a Sharp 37" LCD that does 1920x1080, an HTPC with HDMI output, and a PS3. I downloaded trailers for X-Men 3 (720p) and Casino Royale (1080p) from the PS3 store to check out the PS3's ability as a video player. Both look great of course, but it's simple to see there's just more detail in the Casino Royale video.
An even better example is Planet Earth in 1080p recorded from the BBC HD service. A lot of time and money was spent filming that series and every time I watch an episode I'm just blown away by the quality - it's so good that it is hard to listen to the narrator! That will be my first Blu-Ray video when it becomes available.
As the owener of a 1080p set and an HD-DVD player and a viewer of comcast's HD cable offering. There is absolutely a difference between 1080i and 1080p.
Obviously broadcast quality is going to be of a lower bit rate than those that are found on an HD-DVD but the difference is still significant. Even in upconverted DVD's such as the italian job it's easy to see the "flicker" that is associated with the film version and some of the theater nuances begin to come through. It's pretty amazing.
One of the _main reasons_ for the huge viewing distances was to get the TV so far away that you see no visible bluring. Thats even how the typical viewing distance (5 times the picture diagonal or something like that) was derived: how far to i have to put the TV away as to have it look "real", i.e. as sharp as the rest of the world.
So WHY THE FUCK do people insist on buying huge, flicker-free, x-ray free flatscreens and STILL have them as tiny keyholes in the distance? Of course you will be eye-limited in that situation.
Geez. Just put it half as far away.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
"why would you try to analyze it with a specific TV size to try and resolve an answer useful across all display sizes?"
Presumably you choose a reasonable number, and those were reasonable numbers he suggested in the article, a 36 inch TV at 8ft is 91cms TV. Thats a big TV at a reasonable viewing distance. I have an 82cm at 7ft, which works out very similar and seems to be the comfortable viewing distance for that TV.
There's little point in calculating it for the full field of view because you only see color fully in center of vision, your field of view is curved not flat, and the closer a TV gets the more your eyes work to pull the focus, making it uncomfortable to watch.
His numbers seem to back up my own experience, I can't tell the difference at normal viewing distance, but I can when I look close up. So basic 1280 x 720 HD is fine and 1920 x 1080 is overkill for me. I'm sure people will do the same calculation and come up with numbers for themselves, but I think his numbers were OK.
There are other variables than "How does 'The West Wing' look in HD when I'm sitting on my couch". Such as:
- 1080p provides a good display option for the most common HD broadcast format, 1080i. Since most new displays are based on natively progressive technologies (DLP, LCD, LCOS), you can't just do a 1080i output. So, 1080p allows them to just paint the two 1080i fields together into a progressive frame for high quality display.
- 720p upscales to 1080p easily. Probably better then downscaling 1080i to 720p and losing information.
- Computers attached to HDTVs are becoming more and more common (not just game consoles, true computers). Scaling or interlacing has nasty effects on computer displays and all those thin horizontal/vertical lines and detailed fonts. 1080p gives a great display performance for Home Theater PCs.
- You are not always sitting 12-15' back from the TV. 1080p maintains the quality when you do venture closer to the set.
- Front Projectors are increasingly common (and cheap), so the display size can be quite large (100-120"), allowing you to see more of the 1080p detail.
All that said.. If I were buying a new display today, I would still stick with 720p, for two main reasons:
- Price / Performance. 720p displays are a bargain today, 1080p is still priced at a premium.
- Quality of available content. The majority of what I watch in HD is from broadcast TV. Many broadcasters are bit-starving their HD channel by broadcasting sub-channels ( e.g. an SD mirror of the main channel, a full-time weather/radar channel, or some new crap channel from the network in an effort to milk more advertising $$). So, the 1080i broadcasts do not live up to the format's capabilities. Watching The Masters last weekend proved that dramatically. My local broadcaster has the bandwidth divided up quite aggressively, so any scenes with fast movement quickly degrade into a mushy field of macroblocks. Utter garbage, and very disappointing.
Like when everyone used to say that the human eye couldn't distinguish between 27? 30? FPS and 60. I could certainly tell a difference.
Yet human vision is even better than reported since is able to perceive misalignment in lines and curves (e.g aliasing pattern) at sub-receptor accuracy - see Venier Acuity: e.g http://www.pc.ibm.com/ww/healthycomputing/vdt13eye e.html
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
articles like this are always fill of assumptions and BS.
Its been proven humans can only see so many frames per second right?
What is it, 30 or something?
And yet people CAN tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps in simulations, games, etc.
Just because you cant see a single pixel out of so many degrees at so many feet dont mean shit.
higher resolution will always look better, even if you can't pick out one minor detail (pixel) of it, or understand why.
TFA is way off on the performance of the human eye, and you can check this easily yourself.
I have 40/20 vision, and have a 10G pix camera with a 3x zoom. Even all zoomed out, and only covering 10 degrees, it is still under performing my eye in resolution, and the limit is clearly pixel distance in arc-seconds.
(Look at a TV tower or antenna in the distance and then take a picture of it and compare)
My camera needs to be about 10M and 5x to be similar to my vision.
So to get it just as good as your eyes, 200Mpix to cover 45 degrees, or 2Gpix to cover a full view.
This is from empirical evidence. Just doing the math from the diameter of the pupil=5mm with 500nm (green)light, the eye has therefore a maximum resolution of 5mm/500nm=10000, so 180 degrees would be (10000pi)^2 or 1Gpix. (maybe the difference between these two calculations is the ability of the brain to "dither" as the focus moves, or that we have two eyes)
1080p is only 0.2% or so of this resolution.
Vision resolution is of course only this good in the center, and you compensate by moving the focus around the image to take it all in.
It would actually be nice to have technology that was better than my eye (like 10x binoculars) to get that would take 10^2x1Gpix or 100Gpix. That would allow me a full view, and ability to walk up to an area of interest to look closer.
Conclusion: Give me 1Gpix for each of my eyes, and the resolution is just good enough, but not great.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
You're comparing apples to oranges. Lossy compression in audio works because it throws away stuff that the average person can't hear. Everybody doesn't hear the same, and I don't know of any way to test it. The stuff on the web that claims that you can't hear any difference over 128kb/s always neglects the fact that they haven't actually tested what they claim they're testing (but that's another post). It is entirely likely that reducing the sampling on lossy compression audio results in a different model than reducing the sampling rate on uncompressed audio.
Then you add in the fact that if you're listening to highly processed music versus symphonic music, and you quickly come to the conclusion that everybody is talking out of their ass precisely because we have no good way to test audio perception of sound nuance.
If it was that cut and dried, there would be no hi-fi industry.
This is very interesting, though not surprising at all. It's more of a issue for todays LCDs than it for todays Plasmas. A 50" Plasma at around the $2000 range has a resolution of 1366x768. That is just a bit more than 720p broadcasts at 1280x720. If you feed 1080p programming to such a TV it will be scaled down by a massive 50%. That would still provide 12% more detail than a native 720p signal... though at a normal viewing distance, I can't believe that it would really make a big difference.
LCDs can display the whole 1080p natively for about the same price as its Plasma counter part. However, most 42-50" LCDs I've seen don't produce a picture anywhere near as deep as my Plasma. My friends who own those LCDs actually noticed that as well. Therefore, its really a no-win situation for anything less than the high-end (very wealthy) customer. You can have a higher pixel count LCD but lose significant detail due to decreased contrast (black level, etc), or a lower pixel count with more detail. Conclusion: Middle class consumers shouldnt really care about 1080p just yet.
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
$1200, 42", 1920x1080 computer monitor with perfect color and high speed refresh. What were you saying?
I use an HDTV as a monitor for my desktop computer. I NEED those pixels, man. 1280x720 is worse than my laptop resolution. I'll take 1920x1080, and not even think twice about it.
When it comes to head mounted displays (which we will see more and more of in years to come) the advertisers deliberately disguise the size of the screen. They start saying how the picture is like looking at a 90" screen 50 feet away, or some other awkward combination of figures you have no feel for. What you do have a feel for is a screen that is 2 feet away, your computer monitor. If a company said...
Our amazing new Viso-Glasses give true cinema performance. They are like watching a 14 inch screen, 2 feet away.
You would be pretty unimpressed since you know how crappy a 14" monitor looks (especially if you worked for the same cheapskate software company I did
They are like watching a 70 inch screen, 10 feet away.
Then you will be much more impressed, yet it is the same field of view (it's just linear, double the distance and you double the screen size to get the same FOV). Now 70 inches at 10 feet sounds quite a bit like what you might get in your home if you've just spent $4000 on 70 inch plasma screen and put it in your living room. I suggest that you save your money and instead buy a good computer monitor and put it 2 feet away. You can get a bigger FOV and the same resolution for a much lower cost than those crazy 70" screens. We can all save a fortune by moving things closer to our eyes!
60*60 = 3600 mm^2. 70*48.5 = 3395 mm^2. 5"x7" = 178*127 = 22606 mm^2.
I am somewhat knowledgeable about audio and video systems...worked as an "electronic assembly engineer" for a big A/V house in the early 80's while completing college. The job was pre-wiring, constucting, and testing A/V systems for everything from the airports to discos to churches. I've kept up over the years and have a pretty nice system in my new home that I designed from scratch. I did have the wiring and speaker installations done by some pros I know and it was well worth the money. I did, however, calibrate the audio and video myself.
So, I have friends and family frequently ask me "what set" and "what resolution" questions. My answer is simple and stays away from seating distance and ambient light calculations. I tell them to take several DVDs they know and love that vary in content...action, comedy, drama, etc. so they can see how the set performs over a range of material...to the store with them and WATCH the TVs they think they want. I refuse to go with them or recommend specifics for the most part. I will on occasion suggest LCD or plasma sets based on their viewing area and light sources, but again, I don't go into gory detail.
This is primarily because I believe it's very subjective and since I already have a great TV, they need to pick the one they love. Plus, this has the benefit of me not having to hear "dude, that TV you TOLD me to get sucks, killed the cat, etc." when buyer's remorse kicks in.
I do recommend they get any HD set properly set up either by me (for free...I'm an idiot) or a ISF-certified tech. Again, no long discourses on color temperature, etc. I just tell them "it will look better and your set will last longer" and that's almost always good enough.
That's why articles like this typically just irritate me. You can quibble over every little thing as well as the larger issues forever and at the end of the day, it comes down to whether or not the buyer likes what they see. Most really have no clue about 720p or 1080p...it's usually just "ohh....pretty!"
On a side note, I saw the new Disney flick, "Meet The Robinsons" in Disney Digital 3-D last week and THAT got me excited about display technology. The movie itself is cute and the kids will like it. The 3-D was as good as I've ever seen and for the most part, refrained from shoving things in your face for the "see? it IS 3-D!" effect. You still have to wear glasses, but they're not the old red/blue cardboard jobbies. Instead, they're plastic, dark (polarized) "sunglasses" that make everyone look like Roy Orbison and were quite comfortable to wear for 2+ hours. Even if you hate the thought of sitting through a kiddie cartoon movie, you might want to go just to see the 3-D...it's that good.
I am my own gestalt.
SCREEN RESOLUTION
With my 42" 1080p LCD tv I can hook up my computer to it and have a desktop of 1920 X 1080.
So yes I do see and benefit from having 1080p.
The new sony 60" xbr2 display has 1080p native resolution and 1080p HDMI input.
However... if you hook DVI up to it it supports some lame resolution like 1376x900 or something along those lines.
Why doesn't it support 1920x1080? Is this something a DVI to HDMI adapter could handle?
Even if 1080p60 content doesn't exist natively today, it almost certainly will within 5-10 years. Maybe I'm weird, but I've always regarded an expensive high-end TV as a 10-20 year purchase (spending its first decade in the main TV-watching room, then spending the remainder of its life in either the secondary TV-watching room or the master bedroom). I'm in no particular hurry to replace it with a flat TV, mainly because it's in a big, huge armoire that's still going to be a big, huge armoire with a flat TV instead (you can probably tell I'm single... my married co-workers have informed me that they made the same argument to their wives, and had to buy the new, flat TV to put in the big, huge, now-mostly-empty armoire *anyway*).
Now for a dirty little secret: most DLP light engines claiming to be 1080p60 are really playing fast & loose with the definition, and REALLY use DMD arrays with ~960 x 1080 mirrors. They use each mirror to illuminate TWO adjacent horizontal pixels. In effect, they're interlacing the display horizontally, but doing it at a much faster frequency so it's not as noticeable as 60hz interlacing would be. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the NEWEST DLP TVs have reduced the mirror count even more, and use each mirror to render 3, 4 or more pixels.
Also, I read somewhere that quite a few low-cost rear-projection LCD TVs are REALLY using 1280x1024 4:3 LCD panels with anamorphic lenses (downsampling 1920 pixels to 1280, and just shaving 56 lines from the top & bottom of the picture). I'm not sure, but I think it's even legal to advertise a LCD TV as being "1080p60" if its physical resolution is lower than 1920 x 1080 (say, 1440 x 1050) without disclaiming the "true" physical resolution of the panel itself. Would I buy a TV with 1440x1050 panel that's $400 less than one with 1920x1080 panel? Probably... but I'd be LIVID if I bought a 1440x1050 panel advertised as "1080p60", then found out 9 months later what the panel's REAL resolution were.
So how do you fix that on HD? I haven't bought one yet, but after spending some time in a Best Buy to look at what's offered, I can't see paying much of anything for something where the xy resolution is high, but motion is significantly quantized. I don't think it can be explained as beating with the 60hz fluorescents in the store, what does it take to fix this annoyance? No way I'll pay that much for something that looks like I'm getting the motion at about 15hz and without even motion blur to hide it. Has the current HD system, whether 1080p or i or whatever, traded off smooth motion in favor of high x,y resolution, and is fundamentally flawed in this regard? Or was I just looking at cheap monitors or TV spots shot with budget HD cameras?
OK, there's much confusion, and tremendous amounts of false data on this. Do a search on CSF, and pay attention to the range over which the eye is sensitive to detail. Any chart or formula based on an acuity of one arcminute is going to lead you astray.
Use a graphics program to prepare a chart for yourself. Make, for example, 20 equally spaced lines of black on a white field. Space them at 0.10" centers, per black/white line pair. Print this out at full size. Now tape it to the wall, and walk backwards to the point where you can just barely distinguish lines, rather than a gray box. Measure the distance, do some simple trig, and you'll be able to determine your own CSF. Or rather, not a function, but your own contrast sensitivity at a given light level. CSF varies with illumination. So a plasma screen at 1500 cd/sq meter will look sharper than an LCD of equal resolution and size at equal distance, with a brightness of only 500 cd/sq meter.
Consider that black and white line pairs are the extreme condition. Most picture content will not exhibit such contrast. So for any display screen, if you convert the lines/degree from the chart experiment, and solve for an equal lines/degree for the screen you like, you will find the distance that is ideal for that screen. At that distance, or more, you will not see pixels. Below that distance, you may.
The counterintuitive reality is this: HD was intended to allow closer viewing than NTSC. Most people assume a greater distance, but that's just wrong. A shorter distance and the larger screen blows you away because it fills a larger field of view.
--- Bill
"If you use your HDTV as a computer monitor, definately."
WebTV dude.
One thing bothers me whenever people do calculations of the resolution of visual perception. They base it on some obscure fact about the limits of visual acuity. This article takes the value of 2 arcminutes and proceeds from there. But the calculation is very sensitive to that value and I don't trust the number I'm given, so I devised a test figure of my own.
The figure is a black background with a single white dot, a single-pixel line, two lines separated by one pixel, and two dots separated by one pixel.
I looked at the figure at 1:1 zoom on my 15-inch diagonal (13 x 8-inch rectangle) MacBook Pro LCD display under natural light. I have an uncorrected astigmatism and about 20/40 overall vision, so my results will be conservative relative to the supposed average vision.
I can detect the single dot at a distance of 9 feet for an acuity of 0.28 arcminutes. I can distinguish the paired dots at 3 feet (1.7 arcminutes). I can see the single line from the far side of my apartment 30 feet away (0.0015 arcminutes). And I can distinguish the pair of lines at 4 feet (1.3 arcminutes).
I've been doing some research on HDTVs and am about to buy a 32-inch 1080p LCD set. From 8 feet away the single pixel angle is 0.56 arcminutes; separated pixel pairs are 1.12 arcminutes. I should have no problem detecting single pixels, and line pairs will be just below my visual acuity.
I'm comfortable in the expectation that 1080p is a noticeable improvement over 720p and it is approaching the limit of my perception for distant viewing. Another factor in my decision is that most 720p sets are actually 1366 x 768 pixels. I am bothered by scaling artifacts on my laptop with non-native resolutions, so I think I'd notice such artifacts on a television too. It's true that actual 1080p or 1080i media might currently be lacking, but going with it now is a better bet for the future. My current standard TV is ten years old. I hope to have the new one that long, or maybe I'll get a bigger screen in five years and use the 32-incher as a massive computer monitor. I'm sure that I can appreciate 1080p resolution from three feet away.
AlpineR
"What you are forgetting is geeks like the shinny top of the line. I mean really, if we can't brag about our gear, what can we brag about. "
Penis length.
Other posters alluded to it but in my experience with my supper club's HDTV's tuned to ESPN HD, the MPEG4 artifacts are so annoying as to make me want to tear my eyeballs out. A basketball game where the lines on the floor don't pixelate every time the camera moves makes me want a plain old TV that may have been interlaced but didn't use god-awful compression. Does anybody else notice this?
He points out the human eye resolves one minute of arc, and then talks about that meaning "12 lines per degree".
One minute resolution means a screen subtending 30 degrees wants 1800 pixels, which is about right for 1920x1080.
But in fact we can resolve a little bit below a minute on non-moving parts of an image because our eyes move and gain sub-pixel resolution over time. (This may suggest that 1080p isn't a great deal better than 1080i because 1080i provides the full res on still images but gets jaggies or blurs on moving images. 1080p is just nice because you don't have to play interlace games.)
If your screen subtends 30 degrees, 1920 is about right. You won't gain a great deal going to 3000 or 4000 -- but you will gain something. My desktop screen is 2560 x 1600, and even it's not enough for my stills.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Most people cant see well enough to look out the window and notice things, how are they going to tell the difference in resolution at that level?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I know a guy that works at Evans & Sutherland and works on laser projectors that pump out 30 megapixels of video. He says that 1080p now looks like total crap to him and he won't buy it.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Just because the content isn't captured in 1080p doesn't mean it can't be displayed that way.
One shouldn't have expectations that buying a high-speed rated tire will improve performance of the car itself. That makes no sense! The point of the speed rating is the tire is designed to withstand driving at those speeds, whereas if you put a S-speed rated tire on your exotic sports car and drive 200mph, your tire may very well "fail" in same same way Firestone SUV tires of a few years ago did.
Getting back on topic, a TV's resolution support will have a direct impact on what you can see. To reverse the bad car analogy here, the poster just said that one shouldn't buy a 1080p monitor and expect all their 1080i and 720p content to look better. No kidding.
The reason for buying the 1080p monitor is so when 1080p content starts appearing, you have the monitor to view it already. Just like buying 200mph tires for a Prius would be worthwhile if you were going to be adding a jet engine to your Prius next month.
First-rate 1080p really is better; if you look at first rate Blu-ray material on a top level Sony Bravia lcd, it's obviously POSSIBLE to get a more detailed picture. Really. Just go look.
However, those of us who had laser disks back in the day already know that POTENTIAL resolution doesn't matter. I owned laser disks that offered picture quality no better than than you could get with a VCR, and I owned at least one laser disk (from an IMAX source video) that would knock your socks off if you saw it in a store today.
to know that its better than 1080i. Christ, 1080i looks like complete ass the second there is any fast movement.