One of the reasons why HD took a while to take off Stateside was that the Great American public were a tad confused as to what was and wasn’t HD. Fortunately it seems that in the UK this isn’t the case. Or is it? I went to the Toshiba launch in Hertfordshire last week and took a peek at its range of LCD televisions.
Up until now most of the HD ready sets that have been on sale in the UK deliver 1366x768 pixels which are fine for Sky’s output of 720p and 1080i footage. However Philips and now Toshiba offer sets with 1920x1080 panels capable of displaying what may be the ultimate HD picture – 1080p.
And even though Sky’s HD footage is in 1080i and 720p somewhere in the future we will have Blu-ray boxes, PCs and possibly second generation HD DVD boxes capable of outputting 1080p. Also you can bet that it won't be too long before someone out there starts branding 1080p boxes as higher high definition.
The problem is that there may be issues with 1080p sets and Sky’s transmissions. If the set has to upscale the transmissions to fit its format then we might see the set deliver image quality that is worse than the 1366x768 sets.
Philips has always maintained that the key weakness for HD sets, especially LCD ones, is image blur and it working to deliver steadier images with technologies like Pixel Plus HD. Toshiba is even promising 100Hz processing on one of its HD sets. The scary part is that Sky is set to debut its HD service next month and just like in the good old USA punters may end up being so confused by what is and isn’t HD TV sets they put off buying a model for another year or so.
Anyhow let's see what the makers say.
Personally, I think this article is just confusing the matter further.
To watch HD 1080 content natively (whether 1080i or 1080p), you need a display capable of 1920 x 1080 pixels. A display with anything less less than that will have to downscale a 1080 broadcast and therefore will not display HD 1080 natively in either its 'i' or 'p' form.
Having said that, the current 1366x768 or 1280x720 panels do make a good compromise today between image quality vs cost for HD content and of course 720p content will display natively on these panels.
Hopefully it won't be too long before the native 1080 panels become as affordable.
Although 1366x768 looks OK!
Serious people perfer high quality videos so you gotta get 1080p Tv set as 720p is lowest quality and will be the next Edtv in coming years.
Bandwidth is the only thing holding off 1080p broadcast and since most sets reduce 1080p to 1080i and upconverts to 1080p.
Beware of certain HDTVS as the sets drains colors to look washed out
Geoff: "To watch HD 1080 content natively (whether 1080i or 1080p), you need a display capable of 1920 x 1080 pixels".
As far as I know 1366x768 pixel televisions are capable of displaying 1080i at the monitors lower resolution (1366x768).