I’m about to purchase a new Plasma TV and thought i’d post about the new acroynms that have become my obsession.
Let’s start with 1080p. There are 3 types of HDTV’s available today: 720p, 1080i, and 1080p. What do these mean. The numbers refer to the number of lines across the screen, the ‘i’ stands for “interlaced” and the ‘p’ stands for “progressive”. Interlaced means that only every other line is refreshed whereas Progressive means every line is refreshed (both happens 24 times a second). To date, only 720p and 1080i have been available. Because ‘p’ refreshes every time, it’s better than ‘i’. But 1080 is better than 720 because it is more lines. So it’s a toss up between the two.
BUT, then came along 1080p, the best of both worlds. These TV’s are just hitting the market now and should be everywhere by this summer and definitely by Christmas. So, the question i ask myself is: do i wait for one of these or shell out for one of the others?
Doing this research (thank you Dr. Raduchel) i found out the following items:
There is NO detectable differnce between 1080p and 720p unless you have a screen larger than 50 inches
There are no HD-DVD’s, Blu-Ray DVD’s, TV shows, or anything available at 1080p. There will be eventually, but it is also true that most movies weren’t shot in high enough resolution to matter. Basically, most movies were shot in worse quality than 1080p so having a super nice picture showing lower quality doesn’t make sense.
The HDMI cord matters. This is the cord that carries the picture and sound to your TV. HDMI 1.3 was just released and you should get this version with your TV. It’s different than 1.2. Speicifically the transfer rate is much higher so if there is a high-resolution standard in the future, your TV can handle it. And, most importantly, it supports something called “Deep Color” which basically extends the number of colors from millions to billions. In the future, you’ll probably want your TV to be using HDMI 1.3. The PlayStation 3 was one of the first to have it and most TV’s will have it soon. (Go here if want to know more)
So all this being said, i’m probably going to go with a 720p Plasma from Samsung. Anyone else have any thoughts or experiences that they’d like to share?
