1080i/p

[strredwolf]

http://www.audioholics.com/education/display-formats-technology/1080p-and-the-acuity-of-human-vision

It's a "study" of how actually good 1080i/p would be for HD content.  In it, it claims that on average people only can distinquish two dots within 1/30th of a degree in their field of vision.  Any closer and they'll merge in your eye.

Let's do the math here.  If you're 10' away from your TV screen, to see all the lines w/o mental blurring, the distance from line to line would be, um....

10 feet * 12 inches/foot * tan(1/30 degrees) ~~ 0.0698ths of an inch (aprox).  In printing terms, that's 14 dpi and change.  Your screen would need to be roughly 6.25 feet tall -- and in the realm of most projectors (I doubt they make LCD's, plasmas, nor SED's that large for consumers).  Any shorter and it's a bit of a waste.  Further away and you need to make the screen bigger, until you basically need to go to a movie theater.

I think I'll stay at 720...

Comments

[xilimyth.livejournal.com]

Only reason this Dracocheetah got hirself a 1080P HDTV was because it acts as my monitor.... so 1920x1080 resolution definitely has a noticeable difference versus 1280x720.

That said.... if you're actually watching videos on HD, I can't tell a difference between 1080i and 1080p, and have advised friends the same to save money ^^

Nice catch though :)

[kazriko.livejournal.com]

I can see the difference between 1080i and 720p. The 720p is often better. Interlaced is awful for video games. Very blurry. As for video games and the difference between 720p and 1080p, that's a different story. From a distance it's not much difference at all.

You're right about how 1080p and 1080i aren't much different for videos and movies though. If you're not going to use it for a computer or for video games, 1080i is perfectly fine.

The main reason to get a 1080p tv is exactly that, to use it as a computer monitor. I have a 720p one right now, and using it as a monitor is rather inconvenient and has annoyingly high dot pitch. A 1080p TV would be much better. This is at a range of 2-4 feet though, not 10 feet.

Most of the reasons to not sit that close to your TV went away when TVs went LCD. :)

[kesarra.livejournal.com]

There's a secondary reason for not sitting too close to any screen: focal distance. Your far vision will suffer greatly if you spend a great deal of time in front of a screen. Video games and movies keep you enraptured for hours on end without getting up or looking away. The headaches you get from looking at a CRT for too long would force you to go off and do something that didn't involve near vision.

[kazriko.livejournal.com]

I've spent roughly 80 hours a week sitting within 3 feet of a screen for the past 10 years. I had my vision tested 2 years ago, and compared to my results from 10 years ago. My vision has remained almost exactly the same despite this. To be precise, one eye has changed by one smallest unit of measure on their vision instruments in 8 years.

At the same time, this may be due to all of the practice I have at changing my focal distance manually. I used to look at magic eye posters and then refocus them while not moving my eyes. I found that I can even do this with the Metal Gear Acid games as well, cross the screens then refocus them. I do go outside to drive a couple times a day, and geocache maybe once a week. I don't know if this helps distance vision or not though.

The only real difference between when I had 2 CRTs at home and 1 at work and now when I have 2 LCDs and 1 crt, with 1 lcd at work, is that my eyes do not hurt when I go to sleep at night. I used the computer the same amount before, but I just suffered through it.

[nikkyvix.livejournal.com]

HD television is a big part of the next-gen current generation game wars. Let's not forget; with the Playstation 3, you're paying for potential.

Wether you reach that potential in a visibly markable means, well, hey...Sony's confident you'll overlook this. :)

[felixnminerva.livejournal.com]

But then you also have to consider that according to congress, by 2009, all television broadcast signals are mandated to display in HD. So yeah we're paying for potential with any of the systems, but once 2009 hits, all thos $6000 televisions are going to take a serious hit in price.

But then again, you could always go to...

www.woot.com

Today's Woot is a 42" 1080p monitor.

[nikkyvix.livejournal.com]

Oh sure, analog is a dead-format-walking. But the article's basis is mainly on visual acuity. HD-marketers tend to forget that you can't see the difference between HD formats if you can't see the difference between HD formats, and always push their strategy with the assumption that every potential buyer has 20/20 vision or better. My visual acuity's not perfect (probably 20/30) , and glasses in a dark movie theater for me means the difference between 'The HD effect' and 'The standard okay-but-not-crisp'. I'm holding off on getting any HDtv 'till I'm sure that the difference between 720p and 1080p isn't just numbers for me, save for the price.

Buyers need to be aware that just because they buy the biggest tv with the highest resolution and bells and whistles, there's no guarantee that they'll get to experience what they pay for.

[nikkyvix.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, the skunk-sponsored trip to Fry's down in Texas over Vixmas holiday has given me a good bit of insight into just where I want to go with HD technology. Love that skunkie. :)

[kazriko.livejournal.com]

A couple points on this. They are required to broadcast in ATSC and close their NTSC stations, but not really required to broadcast EVERYTHING in HD. ATSC still supports 480i signals, and the local stations around my house have utilized this by broadcasting their main channel in HD, and also providing 2-3 extra channels in 480i utilizing only 1 ATSC signal.

You can already get decently sized HDTVs for under $500. I paid exactly $500 for my very high quality (1:1600, etc) 27 inch 720p screen. I suspect that 20-27 inch LCD screens will be reasonably priced at the same amount that 20-27 inch NTSC tvs were just 5-6 years ago. $200-400. You'll probably see some $100 or so 20 inch SDTVs that show to ATSC directly.

Plus, as your woot.com link pointed out, 1080p TVs can be pretty cheap already, Both Westinghouse and Spectre have screens for $1000-1300 that are 37-42 inches 1080p. This is too small to tell the difference at 8-10 feet, but at under 4 feet it should be good enough and would make an excellent computer monitor. At further distances, it'd be just the same as a 720p monitor, and maybe $200-300 more in cost.