LethalWolfe said:
ZorPrime,
Do you know much about the 770p function of the set? It sounds like a marketing gimmick to me.
Dont be jealous.
I'm very much well aware of what 720i, 770p, 480i, 1080p, etc. refer to. Do you? There
is a difference between a 720 and 770 monitor, a 770 has greater vertical real estate, which I prefer. I can tell the difference between a 770p monitor and a 1080i. Notice the suffixes? If you actually owned an HDTV or viewed one outside of your local electronics store, you'd probably have a different opinion from what you currently have, maybe not. I dont know what your visual acuity is so its completely possible it doesnt make a difference to you and therefore is a gimmick.
LethalWolfe said:
Assuming you have a good enough monitor you are always going to see artifacts though. The footage has to be severely compressed to be transmitted and it has to be severely compressed to end up on a DVD.
I agree with you that viewing an upconverting a SD signal on an HDTV isn't as good as viewing a native HD signal. But the upconverted image, is still substantially nicer than than the original. Upconverting isn't the same as, viewing a 320x180 movie file on a computer monitor of 1280x1024, then stretching that 320x180 file to view it in 1280x1024 full screen.
As far as artifacts are concerned, an HDTVs resolution has nothing to do with artifacts. The occurrence of artifacts is mainly dependent on two things: the originating signal and how the HDTVs embedded processor processes that signal, interlaced or progressive.
When it comes to HDTVs, the embedded chip processes the signal for viewing in the monitors native resolution. There are two ways a video signal is processed by an HDTV, progressive and interlaced. An interlaced signal will always be of a lower quality than a progressive signal. An interlaced signal will always have more artifacts than a progressive.
Because in an interlaced setting, the first scan is of every odd line of the monitor, then the second follows the previous scan with the scanning of the even lines. We know there are approximately 30 frames shown per second. As a result, the monitor shows one half of every frame per sixtieth of a second. Lower frame rates mean its harder to cover up artifacts, in high speed or action sequences such pan-shots of football players, etc.
Progressive scanning shows the whole picture, the entire frame in one showing, every sixtieth of a second. This provides for a much smoother picture because the frame rate is twice as high, 60 frames per second, compared with interlaced. This process drastically reduces the occurrence of artifacts by masking them. I also agree that pretty much every HDTV will encounter artifacts but progressive HDTV have far fewer and the ones that do creep up are far less conspicuous.
How that converted signal looks depends on the processor. A 720p monitor will typically have a better picture than a 1080i monitor because of the way in which the video signal is processed and in tern displayed. A progressive scan monitor will bump an interlaced image up a generation or so.
As progressive signals occupy more space and require higher bandwidth, Blu-Ray is the preferable choice over HD-DVD in viewing and broadcasting progressive scan/higher resolution HD content. BD have higher data transfer rates than HD-DVD... more information means less compression which means better quality.
