But do you really need it?
Well, the first thing to come to terms with is,
that, as we've pointed out, there
is an abundance of 1080p24 material out there, encoded into 1080i60 format.
If you want to view it at its full potential, you need not only a device
capable of displaying it, a so called 1080line TV, but the ability to
actually de-interlace it properly.
Some will argue that if you are seated far
away and/or the screen is not enormous, one won't "appreciate" the full
detail of 1920 x 1080 (as compared to lower resolution TVs). Well, if you look
at a 27" 480i TV from 20 feet away, you could make the same argument. We
could also make the argument that most people don't appreciate, or even know
of, reasonably good video quality to begin with. The strongest argument for that is to
look at the quantity vs. quality of channels available from your satellite
or cable provider in standard definition digital format vs. a
good DVD in the same format, or even a standard definition terrestrial
broadcast with a reasonably good signal. Even the most massive compression
artifacts are apparently acceptable enough to most viewers such that most
broadcast content providers fill up bandwidth with hundreds of programs (and
maximize compression to do it) with little complaint from their subscribers.
In that realm, if that's
your baseline, then yes, the 1080p vs. 1366 x 768, or whatever your number, is
more of a feel good numbers game. But, that's not us, and if you're reading
this, we're betting that's not you either.
The point is, if you want
to view the inherently 1080p24 content which is out there (and even native
1080i content) with maximum resolution (and we maintain
that an enthusiast who sets up their viewing environment to get the most out
of it can see the difference), you need a display capable of 1080p
that keeps the
signal in a 1080 line format from input to display surface.
Now, if we want to get into the evils of
scaling, we could say that anything other than 720 x 480 displays are a
compromise when watching standard definition DVD content, which is indeed
true. However, this requires some kind of practical sacrifice.
To illustrate this, we are going to use simple
vertical line patterns. We've zoomed them up to make them easily
viewable on your computer screen. They are of course only 1/10th
the full raster, but they make the same
point (if you imagine each pattern stacked 10 x 10 to fill a display, you'll
get the whole picture).
Our 'original' image is black lines, one pixel
wide, with white space two pixels wide, between them. We're going to scale
that up first. We will actually do it two ways. First, we'll do it
the cheap way, where the scalar simply replicates data to fill in the
spaces. Secondly, we'll do it the better way, which involves filtering and
interpolating data so that each new pixel value is a best approximate
guessed value of what it would be if it were re-sampled from the
original image (but it can't be.)
In
the below picture, the cheap way that simply replicates existing data to
fill in the 'extra pixels' the smallest set of vertical lines is the
original 720 x 480, then we show what happens to that when scaled to 1366 x 768
(next largest) and then scaled to 1920 x 1080 (largest) respectively.
The
artifacts are not immediately apparent, but notice that in the 1366 x 768
scaled from the 720 x 480 pattern, all of the vertical lines are not the same
width, nor is the spacing of white versus black the original 2:1 ratio.
Similarly, on the 1920 x 1080 pattern scaled from the 720 x 480 pattern, while
the width of the black lines happens to be constant, the 2:1 ratio of white
space to black line is not.
