The “Break it Down” Blog

Engadget HD has an interesting piece linking to a fellow doing a writeup about the differences of 1080i and 1080p and why P is important.

To recap, all of our HDTV sets are either 720p or 1080p, meaning that is the image they display. Any signal fed to them that isn’t in that format is left up to the TV to scale and fit to that format. In the case of 1080i to 1080p, you are taking an interlaced signal and the TV is de-interlacing it. Meaning on the first pass it will receive all even lines, then all odd lines. The TV, internally, takes those two sets of data and combine them to create a single progressive (top to bottom complete) frame.

The problems arise when you have a crappy scaler in your TV, which is not uncommon. A good scaler alone can run you upwards of $2500, so to keep prices down companies tend to include decent scalers in their sets, but certainly not the most amazing. Same goes for set top boxes from your cable company and any other cheap device along the way (e.g. a receiver that does “scaling”).

With a progressive signal there is nothing to process, and the assumption is that the signal coming from the device (HD-DVD, BluRay player, etc.) is pure and was created by a superior commercial device.

Now with all that nice sounding tech out of the way… do any of you actually NOTICE a difference? I don’t.

I have my HD-DVD player (XBox 360 accessory) hooked up to component and it displays an 1080i signal… so hardly optimal (not only is it not HDMI, it’s not 1080p) and when we watch HD-DVD movies like Mission Impossible III, and I’m staring at people’s pours on their faces (actors are a log uglier now) I’ve never noticed a quality issue that would make me want to go out and buy a standalone player.

I’m hardly a good test case, as I like great images, but I think my margin of acceptance is fairly wide. I’d be curious what the more knowledgeable group of you think about signal differences and specifically what kinds of things you are seeing. In the example of the article, the problem is motion blur (I *have* seen this before, but it’s not horrible to me).