Right, Im thinking of buying a HD telly. The family will still be mainly watching SD so this will obviously be upscaled on the telly. I was just wondering whether it would be best in that case to buy a 720p over a 1080p. If the pic is going to be upscaled, is it better to upscale it just a bit (720p) compared to a lot more (1080p)? Before you ask, I want the HD telly for the PS3 I'll be buying.

Thanks.

What size TV were you thinking of going for?

well hopefully a 42", although there is a nice Toshiba 37" that I've seen that does full hd.

As I usually have to say, most HD ready TV's are 768 pixels, not 720, and they scale both 720P and 1080i to fit the screen. The difference between 768 HD Ready and 1080 Full HD is really quite small, go and try both and see what YOU think of them.

How well the scaling works depends on the quality of the scaler in the TV, generally the more expensive the TV, the better the scaler.

Catch 22 here, upscaling SD to 1080 will look slightly poorer than upscaling it to 720 or 768 the larger the screen, but then you would benefit slightly more when playing 1080 content through the PS3.

Then again, when you are talking of screen sizes of 37-42 the differences are minimal.

There will be a trade off to a certain extent, personally I would get something that benefits the PS3 over SD.

HD is the way forward, so you may not know what equipment you may have/want in the future, Sky HD or Freesat HD for example, both broadcast at 1080 so would suit 1080 better than 720/768 as no scaling is required.

Thanks for the info, its appreciated

The thing is, although I do want a 1080p, its my mum who'll mainly be watching the asian channels on sky and to be honest, i dont think they are planning to broadcast in any hd for a long time yet. Im just going to go and check what the picture is like in currys on the Tosh i mentioned earlier. I really like the thin frame on it, makes the screen look a lot bigger .

The main advantage of a Full HD TV with 1920x1080 is that HD TV programmes are broadcast as 1440X1080i and this is 4time the SD size of 720x540.

So to answer your question I think 1080 is better as it's double the vertical resolution of SD pictures - whereas the 1366x768 TVs have to upscale 540 (vertical) to 768.

Cheers, daveac

Might be off the track here but here goes
I too was thinking of getting a ps3 to go with my nice shiny black 42 inch plasma by panasonic and have heard of screen burn , ( my tv is a 11 generation ) and have heard that early models did have a problem with screen burn but software has now improved to reduce this problem.
Anyway emailed panasonic and got a reply from them that ps3 is not recommended as there could be static images which may burn into the plasma screen ( he means still images in the back ground) and as this is in the manual it would not be covered by warrenty hence knackard screen .
but if you want it for blu ray films the ps3 runs at 60 fps not 24 fps hence you would get a cleaner crisp picture . The BD30 blu ray player by panasonic does not have a ethnet port to down load extras and updates but the ps3 does and so does the BD50 blu ray by panasonic.
Now my options are that has i wanted it just for films as i can no longer play games (counter strike ) as i have arthrites in my hands , so all i say is make sure you know what you are doing before you bye , as a lcd would be no problem as you wont get screen burn .

Whiterabbit
sorry for the long bits

Plasma have come a lot in regards to screen burn, used sensible, image retention is as bad as it gets, most screens have features to remove this, so long as you don't have bright static images oncreen for hours on end you can play games watch TV in relative confidence.

It's also advised to run a plasma in on low settings for the first 200hrs.

The PS3 is 1080p 24fps.

I have had my PS3 connected to my plasma and have had no problems with screen burn playing games.

wow thanks for that i will now get a ps3 ( ))) thanks very much

My advice would be don't get hung up on what resolution a screen has, as Nigel has said a sets processing will have far more inpact on the picture. Find a retailer who can demonstrate their products in surroundings closer to what you would have at home and who have taken the trouble to set them up correctly. Sit back, relax and let your eyes be the judge of which screen produces the most natural picture

How good are Sony Bravias at upscaling to 1080p.

What I mean is how good a end result do you get with watching SD on a 1080p Bravia.

I read that Sony Bravia have one of the best upscaling engines (something like that anyway).

Thanks.

They are one of the best, but as we keep saying - go and look at sets, and see which YOU prefer.

I have to say I disagree with those who say that the resolution is not really important when it comes to watching SD content. Yes it does depend on how good the upscaling engines inside the tv are (therefore always go for a good make such as Sony, Samsung, Pioneer, Panasonic etc) but when it comes down to it, if you only have footage that was captured at 720x576 (SD) then the more lines you have to "make up" the worst the quality no matter how good the tv upscales it.

It's possibly a bit counterintuitive, but a higher resolution panel can actually render a image with more accuracy than a lower resolution one. If you imagine the case of a single pixel in your 720x576 array, this is effectively a single colour across its entire area (obviously a simplification, not least as it is composed of separate RGB elements). But it has sharp edges as it transitions to the neighbouring pixels. These sharp transitions aren't accurately representing the source data - it is just happens to be discretely sampled at (say) your native 720x576 resolution. If you next consider the same image, but upsampled this to a panel with a greater resolution, then you have the possibility to filter some of these spurious high frequencies out of the image and produce a smoother image (since you can represent it in more, smaller pixels) - in a perfect world you would have a continuously sampled output panel, and you wouldn't be able to "see" the pixels at all. It isn't "making up" new data that wasn't in the original image, it is actually cutting down on artifacts that are introduced by the image being rendered by discrete elements.

Apologies in advance for the vague hand-waving explanation.

Richard.

Yes that makes sense but to process the extra pixels you need a more powerful processor and it's the power of the processor which is the limitation in consumer TVs (okay the choice of algorithms etc is important as well). Also those artifacts will be removed by sitting the correct distance from the TV, no one should be sitting close enough to resolve individual pixels.

But surely you must be able to resolve smaller than a single SD pixel at whatever distance you are sitting, or there'd be no point in having an HD resolution...

If you can resolve smaller than the pixel size that would mean you could see individuals pixels - that surely can't be desirable. The optimum point would be to see the affect of the pixel without being able to make out the pixel edges etc (ie the noise created by the "roughness" of the upscaling).

I agree with what you are saying in that if you are sitting close enough to the TV to see the effect of the "rougher scaling" from the lower resolution TV then a higher resolution one will be needed - but at that distance a higher resolution TV should be used anyway. Someone sitting the correct distance from a lower resolution TV (which is most people) will not see the artifacts you are talking about and the lower resolution means the available processing power can be used to better effect.

I think it comes down to getting the right resolution to viewing distance. If you sit close enough then a 1080 TV is required but if you sit further away then the money spent on resolution would be better spent on getting a better quality lower resolution TV. From my very limited experience of visiting friend's houses etc most of them do not sit close enough to warrant a 1080 TV but those that have them are very proud of the fact and are keen to point out that they have a 1080p TV.

In theory, using a full hd set should result in better pq when watching sd media, but because of the cost involved in installing quality processing electornics, hd ready sets often give superior results since there is less scaling/ processsing required.

However there are exceptions - Pioneer Kuros being a prime, ( and expensive), example. On the whole though, if you intend to watch very little hd, go for hd ready set - preferably a plasma - and save a few quid.

This has all got me interested enough to do a little bit of experimentation I've have a side interest in it because I keep wanting to adjust how far away I am from the TV depending on watching HD or SD content... and had read to interesting stuff that I'm sure a lot of you will have come across on: http://www.carltonbale.com/2006/11/1080p-does-matter/

I kept all this on a PC to keep things simple (and make sure I could do an exact per-pixel mapping), but here was the process I followed:

(1) cropped a 960x540 section out of a photo as a base image [not quite the resolution we were talking about before but I wanted to keep things neatly in halves] - call this image A
(2) scale image A up to 1920x1080 with a nearest neighbour / point sampling filter - call this image B
(3) scale image A up to 1920x1080 with a bicubic resampling - call this image C

The idea really is that image A represents the "source" SD-type image. If we view B and C both at a 1:1 pixel mapping, then B is pretty much equivalent to what you would actually get on an SD panel (since we have made each 2x2 block of pixels in the HD panel output the same thing). C is meant to represent what you would get with decent scaling on an HD panel.

I viewed this on a 17" laptop display, with a 1:1 pixel mapping. The panel is natively 1920x1200, which I reckon is near enough HD resolution for what was going to be a fairly rough experiment anyway. I then moved my viewing distance further back until I couldn't see the pixelisation in image B compared to image C. For me, the images started looking the same about 45 inches viewing distance.

Scaling that up to a 40" set, I reckon that would be at a distance of around 8'12". Looking at the graphs on the web link mentioned earlier, the reckoning there was that 720p started becoming useful around 12 ft or so, so I guess my experiment isn't *too* far off those sorts of suggestions.

Whatever, I reckon that if you want a 40" panel, you'd get better rendering of SD on it with an HD panel properly scaled (compared to a native SD panel), if you are going to sit around 8ft or closer to it. Which you might well do if you have things general set up for watching HD cinema and the likes. But then, as bobcar said, you'd already have an HD panel

Some experiments I still might try would be:

(1) repeat on a bigger display
(2) try some different images (I really picked one very much at random)
(3) try different enlargement resamplers. I'd be pretty suprised if a linear resampling wasn't decent enough to be honest for this particular case.

Richard.

It's all just a big ball o' tape......


Buy the most 'future proof' set you can. That's likely to be a good minimally 1080i (native) set.....

Sorry The above should have read 1080p

The resolution isn't the most important thing when it comes to future proofing what is more important is the inputs it will accept. I would contend that a 768 display with proper support for 1080p24 inputs was more future proof than a 1080 display that would not accept 1080p24 properly.

That said future proofing is not necessarily that important anyway, you spend more money now in the hope of saving in the future but it seldom works out that way. Most people I know who "future proof" are usually quick to buy the next "future proof" piece of technology as soon as it comes out. Myself I'd rather be a little bit behind and save money but also get kit that others have ironed the bugs out for me.

Well you won't get too much argument out of me there with regard to being a little behind the times......

Personally I don't know how valuable or otherwise 24fps support is... But I CAN see a very clear difference between my two 37" Hitachi Panels one of which is an older 768 display..... That said, many '768' panels produce excellent pictures from 1080 sources...