Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 1080p?

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by aristide1 » Thu Mar 14, 2013 10:10 am

NeilBlanchard wrote: Where are you finding 42" plasma screens for 1/2 the price of an LED LCD? Why are they so inexpensive?
Bottom line LEDs are not twice as expensive, but top of the line LEDs are big bucks. Direct lighting versus edge versus full array.

Local dimming is a joke, it is too indiscriminate.
Last edited by aristide1 on Thu Mar 14, 2013 2:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by CA_Steve » Thu Mar 14, 2013 1:51 pm

andyb wrote:I was very surprised to discover that "about" 8-feet away a 42" TV is "visibly smaller" than my 24" monitor that I am staring at right now..
Curse you, Pythagoras! Curse you, Euclid! :D

A while back, I was laid up and spent a lot of time on a recliner using the TV as a monitor. I ran into the same problem. I was used to dual 24" monitors and instead had a 47" TV from much farther away. Great for watching content, but sucked for creation. I ended up using zoom tools to be able to read text.

As for >60Hz...
- twitch gamers seem to like >60Hz <shrug>. I don't perceive a benefit in MMOs.
- if you pop up CCC or the NVidia control panel, you can see what the video card will support at a given resolution.
- there's Bandwidth for it through HDMI as the later versions of HDMI (1.3? 1.4?) support 3D...and 3D mode typical runs at twice the refresh rate.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by aristide1 » Thu Mar 14, 2013 2:07 pm

CA_Steve wrote:Curse you, Pythagoras! Curse you, Euclid! :D
So why buy a large TV? Get a Kindle with 1600 * 1200 resolution and hold it up against your eyeballs.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by Vicotnik » Thu Mar 14, 2013 2:20 pm

aristide1 wrote:So why buy a large TV? Get a Kindle with 1600 * 1200 resolution and hold it up against your eyeballs.
We would if not for Emmert's Law. Curse you, Emmert! :D

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by andyb » Thu Mar 14, 2013 3:01 pm

Curse you, Pythagoras! Curse you, Euclid!
So why buy a large TV? Get a Kindle with 1600 * 1200 resolution and hold it up against your eyeballs.
We would if not for Emmert's Law. Curse you, Emmert!
My point exactly.

For my needs right now a bigger screen would bring no benefits at all unless it also ran a higher resolution, but a 27" or 30" screen are still not great useless for several people to watch a movie on, and the extra resolution would be lost due to the content only being 1920x1080.

Although I am still a long way from having my own place, its currently looking like my only real option is to have a ~42" TV for use as a TV (which will be live sports and the news only), keep my current 24" monitor for PC use and games but still have the ~42" TV hooked up for watching movies on via my PC, which then of course also means that my PC and my TV need to be pretty close which might mess things up somewhat. That would bring be back full circle to what I have now, a TV + PC for playing movies that's attached to my LAN, and my PC for general use and playing games.

The only time I could see this changing is when Quad HD screens become affordable (many years) and I have enough cash to buy one or more very powerful graphics cards to keep up the that gigantic resolution, either way, that's nothing more than a pipe-dream.

In the mean time, I will let your thread discussing various screen technologies continue now that everyone has agreed that there is no point at all buying anything less than a 1920x1080 screen at the moment or in the future.

Personally I prefer LCD to Plasma, although I was never able to put my finger on why, and LED is better than LCD because its colours are more vivid, but (and this is big) only if the screen is (a) a quality product (Samsung and LG spring to mind), and (b) you calibrate the settings to your own personal preferences, I found most un-calibrated LED TV's were vastly over-saturated and needed all of the colours to be toned down along with the gamma and the contrast, but not always the brightness. That might just be my eyes/brain your will certainly differ. OLED and similar technologies are the new best thing and not that I have seen any £20k TV's in person are supposed to look stunning when you mix OLED and Quad-HD on a 55"+ TV (that I assume has been professionally calibrated).

I also forgot to mention one of the other reasons why I was looking at a large TV, my monitor is louder than my PC.


Andy

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by CA_Steve » Thu Mar 14, 2013 6:36 pm

aristide1 wrote:So why buy a large TV? Get a Kindle with 1600 * 1200 resolution and hold it up against your eyeballs.
But, it would get in the way of the pint glass...

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by aristide1 » Sun Mar 17, 2013 1:56 pm

Even today to a smaller extent, when you researched buying a pc monitor you could obtain specs for dot pitch.

I wonder what the dot pitch of a 42" 720P screen is versus the dot pitch of a 65" 1080P screen?

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by aristide1 » Sun Mar 17, 2013 6:14 pm

OK, now I'm starting to lose my mind.

Looking at 2 720p plasmas, supposedly 16:9 screens, they are both spec'd out as 1024*768, which is 4:3

Examples used:

The Samsung PN43E450 and this one
http://shop.panasonic.com/shop/model/TC-P42X5?t=specs

You need 1366 * 768 to get 16:9, so what's going on here?

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by washu » Sun Mar 17, 2013 7:47 pm

aristide1 wrote:
You need 1366 * 768 to get 16:9, so what's going on here?
Non-square pixels.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by aristide1 » Thu Mar 21, 2013 8:18 pm

washu wrote:Non-square pixels.
So I learned in one of the most bizarre methods of selling a "wide screen TV" the resolution is 1024 * 768, normally a 4:3 format, but stretched out. The widescreen signal (1280*720) is downscaled and then displayed on the rectangles. It's the biggest farce I've ever seen, next to LED LCDs becoming "240Hz" by simply turning the backlight on and off more often.

Local dimming is up there as sham marketing as well.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by NeilBlanchard » Fri Mar 22, 2013 4:09 am

They can't change the aspect ratio - that would either require faking in pixels or truncating pixels. The picture cannot be stretched, and it cannot be clipped. Interpolation can't change the aspect ratio.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by aristide1 » Fri Mar 22, 2013 7:25 am

The picture isn't stretched in the conventional sense, descaling is embedded with the horizontal resolution. The screen's 4:3 pixel aspect ratio no longer defines the viewing aspect ratio, by using rectangular pixels. It's a cheat.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by NeilBlanchard » Fri Mar 22, 2013 6:26 pm

But it would look stretched? Or truncated.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by aristide1 » Fri Mar 22, 2013 7:10 pm

NeilBlanchard wrote:But it would look stretched? Or truncated.
No, just less resolution horizontally.

I was at BB today, had to shake my head at the high def "demos."
Everything was still or slow moving.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by NeilBlanchard » Sat Mar 23, 2013 3:59 am

Okay, all the TV I've ever looked at have the proper proportions of pixels to correspond with the screen size. I've certainly heard of problems with HD TV's doing worse that regular TV's on regular broadcasts because of poor down sampling, though.

I would ask for a demo that you provide the disk for - this is like shopping for a stereo in years gone by.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by aristide1 » Sat Mar 23, 2013 7:43 am

NeilBlanchard wrote:Okay, all the TV I've ever looked at have the proper proportions of pixels to correspond with the screen size. I've certainly heard of problems with HD TV's doing worse that regular TV's on regular broadcasts because of poor down sampling, though.

I would ask for a demo that you provide the disk for - this is like shopping for a stereo in years gone by.
I doubt any such demo exists, one that shows descaling in 1 dimension only. It works for several reasons as far as I can tell.

1. Plasma in general is pleasant.

2. Descaling accurately is easier to do than upscaling, there's less guesswork, sorry, interpolation.

3. Even descaled the resolution of the display is still higher than SD.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by NeilBlanchard » Sun Mar 24, 2013 3:04 am

You can bring your own DVD or BluRay disk to the store and ask to play it on their set up.

I still don't understand how descaling can be done to expand the width of the picture, without making the image look stretched. What TV's have the wrong proportions of physical pixels for their screen's aspect ratio?

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by washu » Sun Mar 24, 2013 5:55 am

NeilBlanchard wrote:
I still don't understand how descaling can be done to expand the width of the picture, without making the image look stretched. What TV's have the wrong proportions of physical pixels for their screen's aspect ratio?
Don't think of it in terms of stretching, it's still a 16:9 image but with less horizontal resolution.

Non-square pixels is pretty common among plasma TVs. It used to be common back when PCs used CRTs. Mode 13h (320x200) used by many games had non square pixels.

Plasma TVs with non-square pixels should be avoided if you have any intention of using them for an HTPC.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by aristide1 » Sun Mar 24, 2013 12:24 pm

washu wrote:Don't think of it in terms of stretching, it's still a 16:9 image but with less horizontal resolution.
Like the stepper motors in Epson inkjet printers. 5760 x 1440 dpi, no change in overall size or shape, but different levels of resolution horizontally versus vertically. Color me not impressed.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by NeilBlanchard » Mon Mar 25, 2013 4:17 am

Right, if the proportion of the rectangle stays the same, and the resolution of both axis increase or decrease by the same amount - I fully understand that. But, if there is a TV that somehow changes the physical aspect ratio from a 16:9 signal to a 4:3 screen, then that's bogus. There are plenty of correctly engineered LCD TV's that are equal to or better than plasma.

By the way, what is the price of this 720P plasma screen? Is there are reason it is less expensive than a similar LCD - i.e. is it discontinued?

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by aristide1 » Mon Mar 25, 2013 6:32 am

The 1024 * 768 plasmas cost $400.

http://shop.panasonic.com/shop/model/TC-P42X5?t=specs

Click on tech specs, 4:3 pixel resolution, physical aspect ratio 16:9.

Bogus? You decide.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by washu » Mon Mar 25, 2013 8:44 am

NeilBlanchard wrote:But, if there is a TV that somehow changes the physical aspect ratio from a 16:9 signal to a 4:3 screen, then that's bogus.
I think you are still misunderstanding a bit. The physical aspect ratio is 16:9, it doesn't change. It really is a 16:9 screen with 1024x768 pixel resolution. It's perfectly vaild for the pixel aspect ratio to be something other than 1:1. If you fed the TV a 4:3 signal it will display it as a 768x768 4:3 image.

I agree it's crappy to have less resolution then needed to display the full detail in the source, but its really not that different then playing a 1080p source on a 720p set.

You can simulate what the TV is doing using an image editor. Take a 1366x768 image. Re-size it to 1024x768, make sure your editor is not correcting for aspect ratio. It will of course look squished on your 1:1 monitor. Now re-size it back to 1366x768. The image will now have the correct 16:9 aspect ratio, but with less horizontal detail than the original.

A reverse example is DVDs. Normal DVD video has non-square pixels, but is commonly played on displays with 1:1 pixel aspect ratio.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by NeilBlanchard » Tue Mar 26, 2013 5:35 am

Now I'm really confused - what plasma TV is tempting you to buy it?

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by Cistron » Tue Mar 26, 2013 5:54 am

I haven't seen a Plasma TV with rectangular pixels in ages. My uncle runs a 1080p model with 56", which he bought quite cheaply (~600 Euro or so). If you can live with the high power consumption, I thought the colours were brilliant and the viewing angles beyond critique.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by aristide1 » Tue Mar 26, 2013 6:49 am

Cistron wrote:I haven't seen a Plasma TV with rectangular pixels in ages. My uncle runs a 1080p model with 56", which he bought quite cheaply (~600 Euro or so). If you can live with the high power consumption, I thought the colours were brilliant and the viewing angles beyond critique.
None of the 1080 models have this issue, only a few remaining 720p models.

Neil - The Samsung PN43E450 looked interesting, for a brief while.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by washu » Tue Mar 26, 2013 9:35 am

aristide1 wrote:None of the 1080 models have this issue, only a few remaining 720p models.
Actually there are a few 1080p models with non-square pixels. They have a resolution of 1280x1080. They are not nearly as common as 1024x768 720p models.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by aristide1 » Tue Mar 26, 2013 9:46 am

Well, after further examination I deemed the 720p sets not worthwhile.

The Samsumg PN43E450, this year known as the PN43E4500, 1024 by 768 at $400.

The Samsung PN51E530, at $650, obviously wins not only with a 51 inch screen, but with 3 times as much resolution at 1920 * 1080.

Both have plain glass fronts, meaning glare is a possible issue. Coated screens adds another $200 or so to the picture, both literally and figuratively.

Panasonics seems to be slightly ahead (like their motto). All offer really questionable support.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by BillyBuerger » Tue Mar 26, 2013 12:27 pm

For movie watching, I never thought the whole 1080p vs. 720p really mattered much. Yes, there is a loss of detail at 720p, but when you're watching a moving picture from across the room, can you really tell? Or better yet, would you notice if you weren't thinking about it? Just for fun, I just ripped the Hobit blu-ray to 1080p and 720p. I cropped and merged it so that the left side of the screen was the 1080p picture and the right was 720p and watched some of it. Standing right in front of my 42" TV, I couldn't tell that I did anything. If you looked really closely at text during the intro credits, the 1080p side looked a tiny bit sharper. But that was it. The people and everything else I was looking at looked exactly the same. I just did a very small part in 480p as well. You can definitely notice some pixelation there that you can't in the others. But even so, while actually watching a movie, I would very easily forget about that as I am watching the story, not the pixels.

Frankly, I think a big part why the 480p DVDs look so bad is the crappy MPEG2 compression. A high-quality 480p video doesn't really look that bad. But introduce the compression artifacts and it looks terrible. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating we should have stayed at 480p. Just that I think that there are other factors that may affect the quality of the picture more than the easy selling point of FULL HD!

I would still recommend 1080p. For one, it's pretty much the standard. Not many things come in 720p. And if you want to ever use it with a computer (HTPC, laptop, etc...) the crappy resolution issues come into play. Even if the 720p screen isn't the rectangle 1027x768 issue, it would most likely be 1366x768 which also sucks. Video drivers at least handle it better now than a few years back but it's still a crappy resolution to work with. And I found that many TVs overscan that resolution so you have to use 1280x720 for it to fit on the screen but then you don't have a 1:1 pixel ratio so it still doesn't look good.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by Vicotnik » Tue Mar 26, 2013 1:40 pm

Well, it depends on the movie. And the quality of the source. The Hobbit is fine in 720p, but try a crisp Pixar movie. :) Some movies with lots of grain also loses a lot when you resize down to 720p.

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Re: Anybody do more than a cursory comparison of 720p vs. 10

Post by NeilBlanchard » Wed Mar 27, 2013 4:48 am

The bigger the screen and the farther away you are sitting, the higher resolution you need. On really large screens, they need to have pixel multipliers to (hopefully) make them look better.

Have you looked at the old ~300 line curved TV's we used to have? ~500 line DVD's were a revelation! When my ~20 year old ~500 line "superflat" Panasonic 27" CRT stops working, I'll buy the best quality flat screen I can.

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