Would you prefer 1080p or 1527i? (1 Viewer)

[DaveF]

My sense is that, when it comes to a HDTV and a potential HD DVD, people are eager for a progressive version of the highest available interlaced resolution -- 1080p.

And my understanding is that the highest two HDTV resolutions, 720p and 1080i, require about the same bandwidth. So any higher resolution progressive video specification should allow for an equivalent interlaced format. So if 1080p (1080 x 1920 progressive) were made a reality, wouldn't there also be the potential for an interlaced format like 1520 x 2700 (call it 1520i)?

If that were available, what would use use: 1080p or 1520i? Or is there something particularly great about 1080p? Is it the progressive display and if so, why isn't 720p good enough for a future HD DVD?

Or would people just use 1520i and commence grumbling that there's no 1520p? (which would then come out and its cousin, 2130i).

So what do you think? Is 1080p the path to true HT satisfaction? How about a higher res interlaced format? Will we ever be content?

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Well, except that the equal pixel rates are for 1080i30 and 720p60. The people who are trumpeting 1080p on Blu-Ray or whatever are talking about 1080p24 or 1080p30. These formats would actually look very bad, due to flicker and [to a lesser extent] poor motion rendering, except that it is planned to refresh the display at a higher rate, 48 or 60 [with 3-2 cadence for 24fps film material, which I would prefer to avoid] or 72, thus displaying each frame several times.
As a video format, the truth is that 1080p60 would look only marginally better than 1080i30. All this "interlace is bad" business you hear applies really only to film material, which may or may not suffer some odd effects from the interlaced schema but in any case is generally transferred using the obsolete 3-2 cadence method. For live video footage, interlaced scanning indisputably provides the best tradeoff between bandwidth and picture quality [including such issues as motion-rendering as well as image sharpness].
Which is a fancy way of saying, though I don't expect the choice to be offered, I'll take the extra spatial resolution please.

 

[Artur Meinild]

Well, there really isn't much point in the projected format having higher resolution than the source format is there??? It is my understanding that most special effects are done at HD resolution, movies shot digital (like Star Wars II+III) are HD as well, and all movies are stored on HD masters anyways. So how much would these movies gain by additional resolution? And can the difference be distinguished by the human eye?

 

[Rob Gardiner]

If the image is properly scaled, then yes. Ask anyone (including me) who scales their 480i DVDs to 720p on a PC or with a stand-alone scaler (or a scaling DVD player). The difference is phenomenal.

 

[Dan Rudolph]

I don't think this is correct. I believe they're usually doen at 2K or 4K, depending on the movie.

 

[Vincent_P]

:: "...and all movies are stored on HD masters anyways"

Actually, most movies are storted on 35mm negative film stock, which is at least the equivalent of 4K resolution in the digital domain.

As for the question as to whether the human eye can distinguish the difference, well, can you see the difference in resolution/detail on a 35mm projected image vs. say IMAX, or even 65mm? I certainly can, and the 35mm image will have more resolution than HD to begin with.

Vincent

 

[Tony_Ramos]

There is indeed a benefit to viewing DVDs in upscaled resolutions. I view DVDs at 1080p through an HTPC, and what you are doing is effectively providing antialiasing to the image and more closely rendering the analog waveform of the original image. Go to www.videophile.info where the distinguished HTF poster Bjoern Roy explains.

 

[Scott L]

Death to interlaced already. I hate working with it on the computer, or even seeing it's artifacts despite running 480i material through a Faroudja processor.