Just got 1080p, now what

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Tiki

I have to disagree. What you say is partially true, but more importantly SD looks like crap on HDTV because most HDTV's use a technology with a single native resolution (like LCD). Older CRT technology scaled to different resolutions much more smoothly than modern LCD displays.

While it's true that CRT didn't have a native resolution, that's not why SD looked better. It was the small size combined with the relatively poor resolving power of those CRTs.

I remember seeing SD RPTVs, in the 50" class. The picture was utterly unacceptable, you could see the scan lines. 50" is just way too big for 240 scan lines (only half are drawn each refresh).

Now, on the contrary, on my new 46" Samsung 1080p LED TV, SD looks just fine on that if you're far enough away, far enough to be a similar distance as a smaller NTSC TV.

If you question this, think back to the days a couple of years ago when you most likely had a desktop PC with a big CRT monitor. Provided your graphics card supported it, you could set these to operate at almost any resolution and they looked OK. Now look at your typical laptop or modern LCD desktop monitor. These have only one resolution where they look good. Your graphics card will let you select other resolutions, but if you go lower than the native resolution you will get blocky, jaggy graphics and text and if you go to a higher resolution, you will have to pan to see the whole desktop.

This is false logic that a lot of people fall into when discussion moves toward scaling. The problem is the Windows/PC desktop isn't a sampled image, this means it's got high frequency information beyond the nyquist limit so any scaling introduces aliasing that's obviously worse than native display. Fixed pixel monitors perform a step approximation of the input signal, and the PC desktop is rendered, or expected to be rendered as such, which means that in order to retain high frequency information, the sharp edges, you'd need it to be sampled (and rendered) at at least five, if not seven or more times the resolution.

Now in contrast, video is sampled at below the nyquist threshold and thus it can be resampled without loss.

If HD was exactly double (or triple, or some other even multiple) the height and width of SD, it would probably scale OK on an LCD, but since it isn't, the scaling is very difficult to do well.

SD can very easily be scaled to HD well. The whole idea that it needs to be an even multiple is a fallacy and misunderstanding of how resampling works. Resampling "falls appart" on the PC desktop because the PC desktop is not Nyquist sampled, however video content is, so the

What I'm saying is, if you look at SD content on a large screen SDTV and compare it to the same SD content on a comparable sized HDTV, the SDTV will look much better. This is especially true with certain types of content such as text.

I've done that, in fact, I've done better than that, I've compared native SD to upconverted SD on the exact same TV. I had (still have actually) an RCA MM36110, it's a 36" 4:3, direct view CRT HD ready TV. It has no video processor whatsoever, if you feed it 480i that's what it displays.

At one point I compared the raw 480i to scaled (I think it was 1280x1024i), ah, I still have the screenshots....



Same TV, same distance from the TV, same (roughly) size on screen. Only difference is the left side is scaled to HD, the right is native 480i.

Originally Posted by MitchSchaft

How can you not watch any SD anymore? Or do you just watch movies?

If you've got Dish, or DirecTV, it's not that hard, almost all the major networks are delivered in HD. Sure it's not all HD sourced, but even the upconverted SD is almost always way better than the SD versions of the channels.

[eric3a]

How can you not watch any SD anymore? Or do you just watch movies?

I watch massive amounts of documentaries and news. Almost no series, daytime stuff, sitcoms or anything like that (no interest) unless they're instructive/historical. Occasional movies.
It's actually fairly easy to stay away from SD altogether. After the rather large investment putting cat 6 cabling, upgrading all TVs, getting HD boxes, etc.... I'm going to watch HD stuff only!

To me the "total cost of ownership" of an HDTV includes upgrading the rest of the chain.

Eric

[sandor]

Originally Posted by MitchSchaft

You're not gonna notice the difference between 720p and 1080p unless you have a large screen. Say 60" plus.
The majority of shows are shot in SD anyway. I mean reruns and what not.

http://s3.carltonbale.com/resolution_chart.html


a great little chart for viewing distance and TV resolution and diagonal screen size. i believe it was created based on the resolving power of the human eye, from a couple years ago, but still completely relevant.