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

[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.