why is 1080p "better" than 1080i? i don't get it. i have seen 1080p tv's and 1080p movies and they are not smooth. you can tell they aren't compared to regular tv/dvds. i would much rather go for 1080i because it should be smoother, even if 1080p has 60fps. i admit i haven't tested 1080i with 1080p but who can blame me? everyone is crazy for 1080p that 1080i samples are impossible to find.
I think you do have a point, but the problem is not 1080p. The progressive scan is doing its job as an improvement over the interlace scan. I think where a lot of smoothness in playback is lost and a lot of people don't realize it, is in the frames per second, just like you mention. If you have a 24 fps film on bluray, playing on a 60Hz television, it will not be smooth. Same for a DVD. If you have a 30 fps source of material, however, such as a TV show, it will be much smoother. This is why having a TV that supports either 24 Hz or 120 Hz is so important.
just want to clarify the last line, does that mean, if you had 30fps+24hz, it wouldn't be as smooth as a 30fps+120hz? that's not true is it? anyway, i don't see what the fuss of 1080p is. i'm a 1080i person. the quality is there, it needs smoothness.
Yes, that's exactly what it means. When there are only 24 frames per second offered by the video, but the TV needs to display 60, it doesn't work. If it were 30 frames per second, like normal TV programming, the TV would have an easy job and just have to show each frame 2x. However, 24 does not divide into 60 evenly, so your TV has to make a choice about which frames it will show 2x and which frames it will show 3x. This is referred to as 3:2 pulldown. However, if you have a TV capable of 24 Hz, it just shows each frame in a 24 fps video (Bluray/DVD) 1x each second. If you have a 120 Hz TV, it shows each frame 5x. Since those numbers divide evenly by 24, there is no "tearing" shown on the screen when the player and/or TV tries to make 24 fit into 60. If you have a 24 Hz TV, though, it's probably going to have a 60 Hz mode as well. My TV has both.
ah! i understand now. but that has a rather small negative effect compared to the interlaced and progressive right? probably unnoticeable?
The effect is pretty darn noticable, especially in panning shots with a big landscape or something. I haven't spent much time around interlaced HDTVs, though, so I can't really compare it to interlace vs progressive. Sounds like it would produce similar "choppy" playback, though. If you have a 1080p set and you are getting unsmooth playback, I'd say look into the issue of framerate first. It's one of the most commonly overlooked but most important things to do for smooth playback. By the way, although DVDs of films are 24 FPS, most DVD players do their own 3:2 pulldown detection and send 30 FPS to the television. So if you are experiencing this issue with a DVD, maybe it would play better in a different DVD player. Supposedly progressive scan DVD players are better for this. I don't really watch DVDs much so I am personally not sure.
i just watch hd movies on my laptop not tv set because when i was looking for hd t.v.s, they weren't smooth either so i didn't want to buy a hd screen. i'll try to have a look at 1080i screen if i can get hold of one but i don't think hd is a good idea yet. the reason being hd tv has a few channels and they are not 24/7 channels like other ones. i suppose it's good if you buy a huge screen, which i won't be doing.
Ive always wandered this same question i heard that with 1080i it doesnt actually have enough pixels to fi the screen so it sort of keeps swapping about or something like that :S
I greatly notice the difference between 1080i and 1080p. Some people can't though but that's ok, as they probably don't pay that much attention to detail. My blu-ray movies and HD games looked great on a 1080i TV for a couple of years, but once I changed to 1080p, I'm never going back.
Can I ask what the biggest difference you noticed was? Was there judder/tearing like 3:2 pulldown annoyance or something like artifacts of boxes/etc in sharper detail areas, or what?
I would say the biggest difference was that the picture was much sharper and smoother. And having a higher refresh rate was much easier on the eyes.
