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."

Comments

1080p content

[Orange Crush]

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.

People Are Blind

[CheeseburgerBrown]

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.

Re:People Are Blind

[Luke]

Exactly. I wonder how many people claiming they can see a difference between 1080i and 1080p happily listen to compressed audio with earbud headphones.

Content

[BigDumbAnimal]

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.

Re:Article Summary

[nospmiS remoH]

I think the bigger issue is that the majority of HD content out there sucks. Taking crappy video and re-encoding it to 1080p will not make it look better. Sure it's "full HD" now, but it can still look like crap. I have seen many 720p videos that look WAY better than some 1080p videos simply because the source content was recorded using better equipment and encoded well. TNT-HD is the worst network of all for this crap. Many of there HD simulcast stuff is the exact same show just scaled up and often times stretched with a terrible fish-eye effect. It is sad the amount of bandwidth being wasted for this "HD" crap (don't even get me started on DirecTV's 'HDLite'). [/rant]

Re:It isn't that simple.

[InsaneProcessor]

This is just another reason why I still you an old standard TV. Until the dust settles, I ain't spending one thin dime on HD.