Help with HDTV

I keep seeing all this talk about 1080i and 720p and whatever and i believe its something to do with the resolutions on HDTV's and im getting a HDTV soon so im just wondering which is better?

Thanks, Will

 

depending on who u ask u ll get different answers.

in practice, if you sit 2-3 meters away from your tele, even 720p and 1080p don't have a difference visually, so to me 720p is great (for cost-effectiveness).

On the other hand, some guys like 1080i - but I detest interlace

 

Most the talk I've seen is you'd need to be within 6 - 7 feet of the set to notice the difference. Of course a lot of it depends on the source material. IMO if you want to play games of the older variety stick with 720. If you're a 360 and PS3 person you may want the 1080. I chose the 720 route due to cost and my viewing habits, like older games and non-HD dvds.

 

For future-proofing (if you have the time and money), get a television capable of 1080p (it will also do 480i/p, 720p & 1080i natively and will generally improve the picture quality of the lower resolution signals) with at least two HDMI ports and two component ports. If you care about hooking up a computer, consider a TV with a VGA port, but check the maximum resolution supported on that port as it is usually not the maximum supported by the other ports.

For size, it is almost a personal opinion on what fits for you. My wife and I love our 60" 1080p Sony (60A2000) at about 8 foot away. Some people think that is a little too close for a large TV, but again, it comes down to personal likes. Best thing to do would be to grab a folding chair and a tape measure, find a place displaying TV's in multiple sizes (i.e. Circuit City, Best Buy, etc.) and try out different sizes at the distance you plan to watch them at. If you explain to the sales people that you are looking to buy a TV immediately (you don't have to tell them that you might not buy it from them), they generally won't have a problem with you camping out for a few minutes to get the feel of the TV's.

Also, I wouldn't recommend a DLP based set, even though they are the cheapest, because of the "rainbow effect" (RBE). Unfortunately, not everyone can see it immediately, which leads to situations where you don't see it prominently until after you have bought it.

If you really have a lot of time for research, take a stroll over to the AVSForum: http://www.avsforum.com/

 

I thought about the future proofing part, but it didn't make sence to me. I went with the Sony rear projection and it doesn't suffer the rainbow effect, just silk screen. At 6' my 50" looks great.

 

I just want to clarify something here because it is a major issue for a lot of people. Assuming that the TV you got was a DLP, the rainbow effect is not an issue with the TV itself. Rather, it is an issue with the person viewing it. For example, during the research for our current TV, I heard people say that the JVC DLP televisions didn't suffer from the RBE due to how the color wheel is constructed. Within one minute of looking at the screen in the store, I started to get a headache from it.

The problem is that a person either sees the effect or not. The effect itself is a byproduct of how colors are displayed on the screen. White light is projected through a transparent wheel broken up into primary (and sometimes secondary) colors. Screen colors are displayed on the screen as their component colors (i.e. white uses no breakdown, but purple requires using red and blue projections) rapidly shown in sequence. The thought is that our eyes will recombine the rapidly shown colors into their original color. Unfortunately, this implies that all of our eyes function at the same "speed" and this is simply not the case. Particularly those people with very rapid visual processes (e.g. heavy "twitch" gamers), the colors appear as their individual components instead of their original combined color. This makes it look like streaks are on the screen or that there are multiple ghosting images. The best way to see this is to take a dark scene with a couple of bright lights and dart your eyes back and forth. If you see the streaking, you're screwed. If not, you might be ok, but you may still see problems with certain scenes.

 

True, but the sony doesn't use a color wheel. I tried and tried to make myself see the rainbows but couldn't. I guess I'm lucky with that.

 

Pretty much all 1080i TVs also support 720p.

 

Old HDTVs (without HDMI) don't support progressive signals of more than 480 lines. That means there are HDTVs that support 1080i but not 720p. But it doesn't really matter since we're talking about models made before 2004.
As a preference, I fancy 1080i over 720p... as long as the TV's deinterlacer and the scaler do a proper job.

 

Nope, my non HDMI HDTV (CRT) supports 480p and 720p as well as 1080i.

 

Yes but it must be a quite recent model. There was practically no 720p before 2004... in 2003, 720p was as rare 1080p was in 2006.