A corporate cynic are we? I like.

I absolutely agree with you. I'm simply using the author's own words to point out how silly his argument is. In reality, gamers use a multitude of criteria to select their next gaming console, it is not a simple matter of resolution, or gameplay, or any other single thing. 

yeah but it doesnt help that xbox one costs more for a lower resolution.

if they sacrificed kinect and sold the xbox one on its own at £279 compared to PS4's £349, no-one could complain.

instead they give kinect (which no-one wants) at the expense of a weaker GPU (which no-one wants) and price it £100 above the PS4. very bad strategy.

ive always predicted one last 180 from MS and thats to sell xbox's without kinect

I think people who believed microsoft's bullshit PR should be offended by their lies in claiming consoles power parity. 

Edit: And as a PC gamer of 10 years, I'm further offended by the fact that they had the gut to flat out compare x1 to a high end gaming PC, just listen to Albert Penello's podcast. Apparently communcating their product with honesty to their customers isn't in their book.

So I 've been reading the forum last couple of days, and some of the comments that I see have been driving me nuts. Some people either need to get their eyes fixed, or they are just in denial. Regardless I will try to explain some things from a technical perspective.

1080p has been the standard by TV manufacturers for many many years now. The vast majority of TVs sold in retail output natively at 1920x1080. As a matter of fact the standard has become so widely adopted that even PC monitor makers chose to implement it in their products due to a cost of scale. 1080p is by no means new, neither is it expensive. A 40' TV screen can be had for as little as 400 dollars or less. Some 1080p PC monitors go for as little as 100-150 bucks.

Now someone would argue, but 720p is HD too whats the big deal?

Well here is the deal. If you have a 1080p monitor at home, try to lower a resolution to 1280x720. You will notice that the image on screen is very blurry. Downscaling or upscaling by a factor of non integer numbers produces a blurry image. But let's explain that a little better. If I have an image of 1280x720 and I want to upscale it to 1920x1080, it means I need to increase the length and width of my image by a factor of 1.5. So for every 1 pixel in length or width I need 1.5 pixels respectively. This is not achievable without loss in image quality. You can only upscale without image quality loss if you increase your output by a factor of integer. For example 4k resolution is 3840x2160, exactly x2 the length and width of 1080p. Manufacturers opted for this new standard, because they know you can view the current 1080p content without image quality loss.

That is why developers have been stressing the importance of rendering at native 1080p. The majority of monitors out there output in this resolution, and it will be a filthy mess if you try to render at a lower resolution and then upscale. And don't give me that "only gameplay matters" crap. If that's the case then go play your NES.

Meh, I had more fun on the 480p Wii than the 720p Xbox 360, and the most I've enjoyed any console was the SNES.