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

[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.