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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."
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.
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My wife and I were looking at TVs, and we walked past some gorgeous 52" LCDs that support 1080p, and I told her this is what I wanted.
Then she walked past a smalled 32" LCD that only supported 720p/1080i and she said, "this picture looks so much better, and the TV is $1000 less! Why?"
I casually explained that the expensive TV was tuned to a normal TV broadcast, while the cheaper TV was being tuned to ESPNHD. She looked and realized that the most expensive TV getting a crappy signal isn't going to look all the great.
I still want a nice LCD that supports 1080p, but I'm not pushing for it immediately until I can afford a PS3 and a nice staple of BluRay movies to go along with it.
720p looks IMMENSELY better than 480i, or any crappy upscaled images my fancy DVD player and digital cable box can put out. I have yet to see a nice, natural 1080p image myself, but I'm willing to bet I will be able to tell the difference.
If anyone recalls, there were people who insisted that you couldn't really tell the difference between a progressive and interlaced picture.
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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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I assume this is why TV tubes are made with leaded glass, to absoarb the soft x-rays being generated. This is also why tossing out a TV tube improperly is a pollution no-no.
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I'm constantly arguing with people about whether or not you can see the difference between 1080p and 720p or not. As in most other things, many people want an absolute answer: yes you can, or no you can't. They read things containing ambiguity and conclude the answer must be "no you can't." But that's not what the word "ambiguity" means.
As you point out, not everybody has the same visual acuity. My vision is corrected to better than 20/20, and even beyond that, to some extent I've been trained in visual acuity first by going to film school and then by working in the TV industry for some years. My job is to look for picture detail.
I have a 42" 1080p LCD monitor, from which I sit about 6 feet away. I can easily distinguish the difference between 720p and 1080i programming (which gets properly deinterlaced by my TV set, so I'm seeing a full 1920x1080 image). Now, some of that is probably the scaling being done by my cable box, but almost surely not all - and anyway, scaling is never taken into account in the opposite argument (ie. nobody stops to consider that "720p" TV sets are almost all 1366x768 or 1024x768 resolution, meaning they have to scale everything).
I think the bottom line is some people see the difference, some don't, and yes, it depends on how close you sit and how big your TV is. It depends on a lot of things. There's no "yes, you can see the difference" or "no, you can't".
One thing I would say is that with prices being what they are these days, I don't see any reason whatsoever not to buy a 1080p set. The price difference between 720p and 1080p in the same line of sets is usually only about 10-20%.
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.