I did a search on this, and for some reason the threads show up as pretty old (2005, 2006). Maybe it's just everybody knows this stuff except me!
Anyway, I got my wife a nicer TV, 40 " Sony Bravia. I have a 52" Sonia Bravia downstairs. Last night, I noticed the show she was watching (hey, it was her, not me), Dancing with the Stars, was running @ 720p on her set, but 1080i on mine.
I understand p means progressive scanning and i means interlaced. The Sony folks I talked to told me the 720p setting was better because of the progressive scanning.
The Best Buy folks (where I bought it), and other research I did on the web, gave me the idea it might not make a hell of a lot of difference, i.e. not too visible to the naked eye (sidenote, my eyes are naked, aren't yours?) and the bigger deal is watching movies where if possible you'd want Blue Ray @ 1080p.
I have to say it appears to be difficult for me to adjust the settings for either set. I believe I have to go in through the Comcast cablebox settings to do it but under setup it just displays a lot of gobbledygook that means nothing to me and didn't seem to have an option to adjust resolutions.
Your thoughts are welcome, and ridicule will be well tolerated, as usual.
Thank you, tech gurus!
The first question to ask is whether you were watching this content using a cable box or a direct connection. Receiver boxes can have their output configured, so if you were pulling the content over the air or from Clear QAM upstairs and your wife was watching it through a receiver box downstairs, the box could be formatting the output to 720p before the television gets its hands on it.
My HD cable box is old, and instead of using meaningful text like "convert everything to 720p", the menu item is called "Convert1" and "Convert2". I had to set the box to Convert1 to find out that it's converting to 1080i.
So this might be where your resolution setting is hiding.
1080i is the highest resolution Comcast offers, you cannot get 1080p from them as far as I know.
She is watching it through a cable box (Comcast did the installation and they used a HD new box from Motorola that they said is very very new and only about 300 people in the Chicago area have it).
I wasn't able to access her cable box settings when I tried through the Setup button on the Comcast remote.
How about my basic question, what are folks feelings about that? Is 1080i (because of the higher resolution) the desired setting, or is 720p just as good, or better, because of the progressive scanning? Because if it's the latter I would consider setting my set downstairs to 720p too (or, as I said, to do a visual comparison to see which I like better).
I agree with the comment about Comcast's highest resolution they broadcast at as 1080i. That seems to be consistent with what I have heard (1080p would suck up too much bandwidth, it's said).
Neither is "better." The question is what the station is broadcasting. If they're broadcasting it to 720p, better to send it to the TV at 720p and let it upscale to 1080p. Converting 720p to 1080i or vice versa en route to 1080p is not really ideal.
Without knowing the details of the TVs it is hard to really answer. Depending on the age of your wife's TV, it could either be 720p only, 1080p only, or 720p/1080i capable. Those resolution capabilities are going to determine what options the TV has in terms of dealing with whatever the source signal is coming in at.
Your wife's TV should be upgrading a 720p signal to 1080p (assuming her TV is 1080p, but I can't imagine it isn't unless its more then a few years old). As to whether it matters, that is debateable. Many people can't tell the difference between 720p, 1080i, and 1080p, especially as screen sizes drop.
It's also highly unlikely that your wife's TV supports 1080i if it's at all new. That resolution has largely disappeared. Nowdays HDTV's are either 720p or 1080p.
This is incorrect. All HDTV supports displaying 1080i, no matter if its native resolution is 720p or 1080p. 1080i is part of the HDTV standard, and is what half of the US over-the-air HD signal broadcast at. (The other half is 720p.) A 720p-res set will simply scale a 1080i image down slightly for display. A 1080p-res set will de-interlace the 1080i image.Originally Posted by Sarkus
Other than this point, what everyone here says is correct. In summary, a signal starts from ABC or CBS as either 720p or 1080i. (No station broadcasts at 1080p because the bandwidth needed is too high.) It then (maybe) goes through one possible conversion inside the cable/satellite box, and then goes through another conversion inside the TV for display.
In my case, I've setup my cable box to do no conversion, and let my TV handle the resolution changes between channels. My belief is that my Sony XBR has a much better conversion processor/engine than the piece-of-shat cable box. While this is true to my eyes, there is a one-second delay when changing channels, if I switch from a 720p channel to a 1080i one. Many people find this delay incredibly grating, and would rather set their cable box to always convert to a single output resolution.
Anyways, once you know how to change the setting, play around with it and see the difference yourself. It's pretty easy to experiment.
Actually I've heard that in addition, most Motorola cable boxes have trouble communicating with Sony's and there's often extra delay between the two. The TV shouldn't be that slow.
My wife's TV is brand new, Sonia Bravia 40" KDL 40EX400, and hooked up through HDMI to the Motorola cable box. The manual says the HDMI video is at 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p, and 1080/24p.
The highest Comcast ouput is at 1080i so there is no possibility to upscale to 1080p.
I think the cable box is doing the conversions but don't seem to be able to identify yet how to make adjustments within the cable box settings (can't reallly access their menus).
Is everybody's advice at this point that I should find out how to access the Comcast cable box settings and then just visually compare what 720p vs 1080i output looks like?
Or should I try to get it set up like KaoFloppy has it, i.e. so the TVs do the conversions, and it automatically does the conversion between the different resolutions being put out on the various Comcast channels?
That TV is listed on Sony's site as a 1080p TV. From what I understand (and this is reinforced here), that means that any HD source fed to the TV will be converted by the TV into as good a 1080p-esque display as the TV can manage. It is not actually capapable of displaying anything in true 1080i or 720p.
From the linked article:
At this point, I could just expand on that last point and specify that all fixed-pixel display TVs--all microdisplay rear-projection and all flat-panels--always display everything at their native resolution, which is all they can display. On a 720p TV, that means that all incoming video is displayed at 720p (or 768p, as the case may be); on a 1080p TV, all incoming video is displayed at 1080p. The process of converting resolution is called scaling--sometimes called upconverting or downconverting. A related factor is de-interlacing (see point number 8, below). How well a TV does or does not handle both of these processes is a big factor in how desirable it is--and something that casual shoppers often overlook, since, compared to the screen size or resolution, it's not as easy to show as a spec sheet bullet point.
So that makes me think that when you said it was displaying in 720p, what you were really seeing is that the TV was receiving a 720p signal which it was then converting. Your bigger TV must be receiving a 1080i signal, I guess, which could be because of differences in the cable boxes?
Maybe someone more technically oriented understands this better.
You might be right Sarkus. My own cable box downstairs is certainly an older model than my wive's, plus, I have DVR on it and she doesn't.
I'm just telling you what her set, and mine say, when I hit display on the TV remote on the same shows (720p, 1080i, respectively, for her, and my TV). But I have to say, they both look pretty darn good to my eye so maybe the TV (or cable box) is automatically converting everything into as good of a picture as possible?
I wouldn't be adverse to spending a few buxx to get it figured out, but I don't necessarily know that the Comcast folks and the Sony folks and the Geeksquad folks (since both TVs were bought @ Best Buy) can be easily coordinated so maybe I ought to find somebody who specializes in this sort of work (I have a guy who helps me with my home network on my computers, so surely there must be folks who do that type of work with HDTV setups).
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