baka on 19 February 2007
1. If you think 1080p is imporant on a 27inch TV. Go do yourself a favor. Go find a 27inch 1080p TV. Oh wait. They dont exist. At all. Go find yourself a 26inch 1080p computer monitor for 700$ (no tuners at all) and hook your computer up to it. And sit 3 feet away, and then switch the resolution INGAME down to 720p. If you can notice the diffrence. Congratulations. You have better than 20/20 vision.
I don't necessarily agree with that last bit, although I do believe that 1080p resolution in general is not important on a television. 720p is 1280x768, and 1080p is 1920x1080. I have a laptop with a 15.2" 1920x1200 display, slightly higher than a 1080p television can display vertically due to a television's interface bandwidth limitations. (Single link DVI has the same limitation FWIW.) You can definitely tell when it's running a game, or anything for that matter, at a lower resolution by which the physical resolution cannot be evenly divided.
This is mostly due to interpolation, as said interpolation causes a blurring effect. The center of some pixels in a 720p image will map to a location in between two physical pixels of a 1080p device, which means you either have it serviced by two pixels (possibly at different levels for good interpolation,) pick one and have it offset, or resample the entire image in real time. Some displays do a reasonably good job of this, however it's definitely visible on any LCD I've ever seen when it is running at a lower resolution. An image with large areas of high contrast should show the effect of the first two operations, it's the down side to having well defined physical pixels while subsampling your data selectively to a lower resolution. If the display resamples the entire image and redisplays it, you lose some of the input data and its associated contrast.
"How many of you have experienced HD."
The answer is.
"Not many."
That may well be true for televisions. I'd wager that the majority simply aren't interested, especially those with poor vision. Look at how long it's taking digital broadcasting to take hold. It's taken a mandate from the government to shut down analogue television, no doubt because people largely aren't willing to get rid of their current televisions. I know I'm not. My computer monitor on the other hand is HD resolution almost all the time, barring a game that pushes the hardware too much. It's certainly not 27", but you can tell when it's running at a lower resolution. Still, I don't mind the resolution difference at all when I use one of my consoles.
