ahhh... this topic is one that has a sadly convoluted and history and still convoluted present. lol
Actually, unbeknownst to most, 720P was never considered an HDTV standard. It had and continues to have a special category of it’s own known as “HD Ready”.
IIRC 720P was a standard that came about simultaneously with 1080i and 1080P. And it was introduced primarily to address and appease the manufacturing limitations for Plasma televisions and Rear Projection televisions as well as the broadcast conversion limitations that 1080i signals imposed on markets not using appx 60hz for the electrical grid.
The very first HDTV signals were actually carried over analog. The shift to fully digital broadcasts were never driven by a demand in quality but rather a cheap way to cram more broadcast signals (channels) into a single analogue carrier wave, and similarly into the electrical and oddly even the digital optical carrier waves used by cabled technologies.
Bottom line is they had to have this odd mixed approach to integrating and transitioning from Analogue to fully digital that required a lot of hybridization and conversion back and forth.
a sweet spot that didn’t require as much fuss was 720P.... with one exception. It was not a multiple of either 480P / 480i or 540P/540i. This then presented another content challenge with respect to pre-existing source material and how to even offer it within and efficient 720P stream.
Thus it’s always been a bit of a Poorman’s or cheap way of getting HDTV to the masses, without having to concede that 720P was enough to warrant the standard’s bodies’ specific agenda.
oh and one more thing LOL. Since the 1930s anything more than a few hundred lines of broadcast material per frame was considered High Definition. So... if you wanna debate things further you could ground an argument in that preceding technicality. LOL
[automerge]1590625328[/automerge]
absolutely. Autofocus and Exposure control is vastly superior as are (naturally) the core lenses‘ optics and the sensor sizes. Even cramming all that in a 720P container will look far better than a shoddy webcam in a 4K container.
www.imore.com
