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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.
These stories are free but worth money.
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...
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
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.
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.
...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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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.
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.
You're commenting on something which it sounds like you might actually be qualified to comment on! What are you doing on /. ?
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!
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.
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!
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Besides you can always pair your 1080p with this (http://www.oppodigital.com/dv981hd/dv981hd_index
Ohhh Shiny!
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..
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.
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
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.
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
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) :-]
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
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.
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.