My Living Room Isn't Big Enough For The Both Of 'Em (HDTV Discussion)

My father has the exact same LCD I'm looking to buy, so I tried out Revenge of the Sith on it, to see how DVDs looked since he has no HDTV channels ( I also wanted to check out how the action scenes looked, since I heard that there was "ghosting" during fast movement on LCDs).

From a distance it looks impeccable. But if I get closer I start to notice pixelation (I guess you would call it that). Is that standard case with LCDs or is just because I need a "progressive scan" DVD player? I've heard that progressive scans get the best picture out of DVDs. If this is the case, will my Xbox 360 display them well? Or is the "progressive scan" thing hot air?
 
Mav23 said:
My father has the exact same LCD I'm looking to buy, so I tried out Revenge of the Sith on it, to see how DVDs looked since he has no HDTV channels ( I also wanted to check out how the action scenes looked, since I heard that there was "ghosting" during fast movement on LCDs).

From a distance it looks impeccable. But if I get closer I start to notice pixelation (I guess you would call it that). Is that standard case with LCDs or is just because I need a "progressive scan" DVD player? I've heard that progressive scans get the best picture out of DVDs. If this is the case, will my Xbox 360 display them well? Or is the "progressive scan" thing hot air?


Regular DVD is somewhere around 500 (or 480?) lines of resolution interlaced. So Progressive scan is artificially upping the resolution to somewhere around 500p and could very well eliminate the grainyness you speak of. I didny notice any graininess in 1080i off the progressive feed on my dvd player.

To actually use the progressive scan on a dvd player though you must use component video cables (red/green/blue). Any other conection will considerably degrade the picture quality too.

The single rca style jack (composite video) is the poorest quality. S-video divides the picture into two signals (esentially light and dark). And Component video ups the bandwidth again by providing 3 signals (one for each primary color).
The best though (only on really expensive DVD players as far as I know) is HDMI which you pretty much need for true HD signals to be at their full potential.
 
A DVD is 720x480 resolution. NTSC itself defines around 525 lines of information, but around 40 or more lines are "useless" information (VBI information, etc). NTSC itself (so-called "Standard definition", SDTV) is 480i ("i" stands for interlaced, and "'p" is progressive).

An interlaced image means that one half (e.g., the odd lines) are drawn first, then the other half (the even lines) are drawn afterwards, forming a full image. A progressive image means that the entire image is drawn in one pass.

All a progressive scan DVD player does is turn a 480i image stored on the DVD (note - you can have either 480i or 480p on a DVD), and "upconverts" it to 480p. If you've messed with a computer DVD player, you may come across the option called "deinterlace" with options like Bob and Weave. That's just the software DVD player transforming an interlaced image into a progressive one (since computer monitors are progressive displays - the interlaced modes are very ancient).

Now, the only way to get true progressive is to use the component inputs. An NTSC image, based on its roots as a black and white transmission standard, has three parts - Luminance (black and white) information, and Chrominance (color) information. A black and white TV just decodes and utilizes the luminance information. Chrominance is used to add color to the image, and consists of two channels - red and blue.

Because of the way it works and the way our eyes work, the luminance information is given "full resolution", and is always the major component of video. Chrominance can be at a reduced resolution but still look OK. Often half or less resolution is used (i.e., the red and blue components can be at half resolution, or 1/4th resolution). It should be noted that most video compression standards use this to pare down the data initially so there's less to compress.

Composite output means both luminance information and the 2 chrominance channels are multiplexed onto one wire. S-Video improves things by putting luminance and chrominance on two pairs of wires (one for luminance, the chrominance with both red and blue multiplexed together). Component gives the best output as each channel gets its own cable and thus is available at full bandwidth.

Of course, the best video yet is to not encode it into this colorspace at all (the technical term is "YUV" color space), and leave it in the RGB color space, which is what your computer outputs and what your monitor takes in. However, it is a lot more difficult to compress an RGB image in a non-image degrading way than a YUV image. RGB inputs on HDTV are taken in through the VGA, DVI or HDMI inputs.
 
Mav23 said:
From a distance it looks impeccable. But if I get closer I start to notice pixelation (I guess you would call it that). Is that standard case with LCDs or is just because I need a "progressive scan" DVD player? I've heard that progressive scans get the best picture out of DVDs. If this is the case, will my Xbox 360 display them well? Or is the "progressive scan" thing hot air?

To get back to the question, all your DVDs are going to be pixelated on all your HDTVs. You're physically upscaling a low res picture to something that is displaying a high resolution image. There's no way to create perfect images when the data simply isn't there. As I already addressed when talking about 720p and 1080i, progressive scan is an important part of new video technologies (that's what the p is 720p and 1080p stands for). Having the necessary equipment to watch regular DVDs in progressive scan mode is important for making them look as good as possible. But with actual high definition DVDs coming out in a year, simply having your low res ones play in progressive scan isn't that big of a deal.
 
Thanks for the info guys. I'm getting frustrated as every Target store in my area seems to be out of stock and it's running on three weeks or more now. Maybe I should start calling out of town Targets.
 
Target online just got a new shipment of it though, and they are keeping their displays up. Plus they are putting little grey dots on the tags meaning that the team leads realize they're out and are ordering more. I guess I'll just keep checking myself every day I go into work.

Also they just put up a 26inch Magnavox LCD HDTV for the same price. Unfortunately that doesn't come with a free TiVo like mine does, so I think I will hold out a little longer. I have until the 22nd afterall.
 
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