king_of_the_castle said: Kwaad said: whatever said: vizunary said: whatever said:     But hey, were talking about wal-mart people. My father-in-law, a local imbred as I like to call them. Does that make your wife inbred too? BTW, Walmart sells PS3's too...

Fixed.

(unless, of course, he's from San Francisco or something...)

 

And as I mentioned before - 1080i does look different from 1080p on my 1080p display. If I had a perfect scaler in my tv theoretically it could look the same, but it doesn't. It's a tad blurrier, and motion does not look as smooth.

Not being able to play 1080p won't matter for this player though, as 99.98% of people don't care.

The fact of the matter is that 1080i is more than good enough for most people. If people have a choice between a $198 player and a $349 player, the vast majority will buy the $198 player.

Plus there are many people that don't have a 1080p television so buying a 1080p player provides zero benefit. 

Pk9394 said: is there a point arguing 1080p and 1080i when the professinal at every website say its identical????? fanboy need to stop and come back to reality, I understand you like to support the format or ps3 but trying to convince people that movie on blue ray is better because its 1080p???? thats a little too far. having bigger space to put 7.1 sound dont matter to the mass majority of people, to fully experience the difference between 5.1 and 7.1 you'll need very expensive equipements and how many people got a two thousand dollar amp ??? and a thousand dollar speakers???? dont tell me you can feeel the difference on few houndred dollar crap recievers and speakers set. I bet you my 2k 5.1 amp and 1k speaker sound better than most of the crap 7.1 system out there.

every professional at every website huh? so the terms like progressive scan and interlaced don't mean anything? read my post again or go to wiki or avsforum or highdefdigest or greathometheater or engadget or cnet or highdefforum or any number of others and simply read the definitions of each, then come back and explain the technicalities of how they're the same. if you happen to be referring to me as a fanboy you should notice that not once did i mention the PS3, i was simply explaining that a 1080p set is superior to a 1080i display. @lingysis, i see your point with 24fps, but the interlaced display still only has the ability to refresh 540 lines at a time. from all the HD research i've done my understanding is that the video processor in an interlaced display cannot refresh the lines consecutively like progressive scan does. i may be incorrect, but i believe i understand the tech correctly. @makingmusic, good to hear about new line getting that worked out! LotR will be very cool in HD, i didn't like the movies alot, but they should be GREAT showcase titles, like PotC... BTW, that is a good deal if you already own a 720p or 1080i display, but if you have a 1080p display i strongly recommend biting the bullet and getting a full HD player, whether BLU-RAY or HD DVD... though i'd have to go with BLU ;)

I still see a dual format for quite a while

If HD DVD outsells it, which i bet it will if this is true, could be duel formats for quite some time

Kwaad said: Yes, you are right, theoreticaly, you could get the same 'picture' out of 1080i and a 1080p source. However due to re-formatting to 1080i, and then BACK to 1080i, there will be substantial loss of image quality. Here's how I feel about it. 1080p from disc... decompressed, sent to TV, I see it. Not, 1080p from disc, de-compressed, re-formatted, sent to TV, remormatted, I see it. But hey, were talking about wal-mart people. My father-in-law, a local imbred as I like to call them. Bought a Polarid (I think) 26 or 32 inch TV from wal-mart, and was bitching about how 'HDTV' sucks, and how the reception is horrible. I told him. 'Your TV dont have a digital tuner. You cant watch HDTV on that TV, without a special tuner box.' He was like "that is stupid. Why is this a HDTV then, if it cant play HDTV?!' There's the southern mentality buying a 800$ TV they dont understand.

There is no loss of information in "reformatting" a 1080i signal to 1080p, assuming the source material is 24 frames per second.  Any display that has 3:2 pulldown capability can reconstruct the 1080p material perfectly with no loss.

@vizunary, yes, an interlaced display can only refresh every other line each cycle, but we were talking about a progressive display accepting an interlaced signal.  If the source material is 24 fps, the progressive display can show the full frames all at once instead of interlaced.

This may be the stake that kills blu-ray, the one two punch of Tranformers and a sub-$200 drive will really change the landscape.

Not to mention that if Blu-ray drives try and match price with HD-DVD it'll hurt PS3 adoption, so I can't see Sony trying that tactic

Just tossing this in here, there's a sub 200$ toshiba HD-DVD player in Circuit City as well, it's technically on "sale" but they marked the 60GB PS3 on sale as well. Wonder how many people are actually fooled by this thinking they actually caved 100$ compared to other store...

 

sub 200$ hddvd player  

 

Could it be the same one? It looks simmilar though I only have looked at the blurry photo posted above. 

Ugh, every time I read news like this -- whether it be good news for HD DVD or Blu Ray -- I think to myself: "god, what an awful, bloody, expensive mess this format war is."

I don't see either format becoming dominant any time soon, now. The HD DVD stand alone players will clearly outstrip the Blu Ray ones, I think; at the same time, the PS3 is such a dominating for in the HD video market that it's hard to imagine Blu Ray ever really losing.

At my Toys R Us store, you'd better bet I emphasize the Blu Ray capabilities of the PS3 to potential buyers, and I use it as an important and distinguishing feature from the 360.  Even knowing that a large portion of buyers don't know or care about the Blu Ray capability, the fact that even a fraction of that 5+ million DO care puts Blu Ray players on top by a sizable margin. Heck, even 5 percent of users would be enough to give Blu Ray a noticable lead. 

If I had to guess, at this point, I think both HD DVD and Blu Ray will accrue enough market share within 2 years time that neither can really eliminate the other -- the big problem is movie libraries. If I buy an HD DVD Player for 200 now, the big problem later on isn't buying a 100-150 dollar Blu Ray player in 3 years; it's replacing all the HD DVD movies I already have in my library, or vice versa. That just isn't happening unless one of gains an overwhelming advantage. Thus, I'm now betting on dual-players being the ultimate winner, and both HD DVD and Blu Ray being viable mediums for a long time. That would be a first -- I'm sure neither Sony nor Toshiba considers that their best case scenario -- but I don't think we've ever had two formats compete so viciously before.

But more imporantly, now that my VHS has broken, does anybody know if you can still buy new ones? And how much are they?

vizunary said:   @lingysis, i see your point with 24fps, but the interlaced display still only has the ability to refresh 540 lines at a time. from all the HD research i've done my understanding is that the video processor in an interlaced display cannot refresh the lines consecutively like progressive scan does. i may be incorrect, but i believe i understand the tech correctly.

 well, entroper already answered it.  i'll just repeat in a wordier way.

yes, interlaced means half of 1080 lines = 540 lines at a time, and like you said, does not refresh lines like progressive which would be 1080 lines at a time.  however, updates are done at 60 times every second.  this means that for 24fps movies, you have more refreshes than is necessary.  essentially you need to "stretch" each movie frame into either 3 or 2 refreshes, which is what entroper meant by "3:2 pulldown".

so your 1080p TV is working with more information than really necessary.  therefore, as long as your TV does the right thing with the signal (which according to some isn't always the case), there would be zero visual difference between a 1080i and a 1080p video ouput source, on 24fps movies.