1/4 HDTV and Full reslution HDTV on FPTV (1 Viewer)

I'm looking into the Front Projector market to possibly replace my Toshiba TP50G90 RPTV. I like these new LCD Projectors like the Sanyo PLV-Z1 and the Panasonic L300. I'm looking to watch a lot of widescreen DVD's and possibly start watching some HDTV. Now I'm reading the reviews of these prjectors on projectorcentral.com and I know they aren't WXGA resolution but the reviews say the HDTV picture is stunning. Now would the HDTV picture be even more stunning or crisper on a projector say like the Sony HS10 which is full WXGA? I'll be watching the projector on a 106" widescreen sitting at about 15' away from the screen. I'm not set-up for HDTV at the moment and may not be for a few years so I don't care too much about it until I can get my hands onto ESPN HDTV when they finally start broadcasting it somewhere over here. But I want to be ready for the future with this projector. In other words looking for some feedback. Thanks.

The reviews have been really good for the Panasonic L300 but I really don't understand this 1/4 HDTV thing. The reviews do state that HDTV signals look great on it, but how could they with only 1/4 HDTV output. Hope other more Front Projector savvy members will add their opinions too.

From projectorcentral.com...
"The 960x540 resolution format has been designated "1/4 HD" both in other industry literature and on our site. This is truly unfortunate because though it is technically accurate it is highly misleading. The "1/4 HD" format was created because a native 1080i HDTV signal which is 1920x1080 can be scaled quite efficiently into a matrix that requires a compression of precisely 50% in both the horizontal and vertical dimensions. Notice that 960 is one-half of 1920, and 540 is one-half of 1080.

Predictably, the term "1/4 HD" has produced more confusion than excitement in the minds of consumers. The typical buyer would quite understandably object, saying, "Hey, why would I want a projector that does only 1/4 of an HDTV signal? I want one that will do all of it." The reality is that there are no digital projectors on the market capable of producing a good looking, high contrast HDTV image in native 1920x1080 physical resolution. So they ALL compress HDTV 1080i into their reduced native formats. Picture detail is always lost in the process, no matter which resolution you are dealing with.

To put it into perspective, a WXGA format projector (1365x768), compresses 1080 lines of HDTV information into 768 physical lines. A WVGA projector (848x480) squeezes 1080 lines into 480 physical lines. Now, the results end up looking amazingly good, and quite a bit better than DVD. But in no instance are you ever seeing 100% native HDTV.

The advantage of the 960x540 format is that scaling down precisely 50% in both dimensions generates a comparatively clean compression. The result is that the HDTV 1080i image on a product like the PLV-Z1 can look equal to or better than that which you'd get on a higher resolution WXGA projector."

Cool. Thanks Jim. Very informative and interesting. I am in the market for something like this...just got to figure out the right screen size, distance etc...

Thanks again for sharing that info. Take care.

One little addition. Sony is currently working on a chip that will do dull 1920x1080 so you can expect to see a display from them in the next little while based on it.