Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater 720p and 1080p

This may be a bit off topic but I am getting a 58" panasonic plasma and it supports 720p/1080i.

My viewing distance will be about 11-12 ft. Will I see any significant difference by going to 1080p if I get a 1080p display?

All right, gentlemen, I want a good, clean fight. No hits below the belt, no biting, no kicking.

lmao!

It will accept 720p/1080i input but, what is the native resolution of the panny?

You may or may not be able to tell the difference. That's all I can conclusively say.

OK, which one?

I'm looking at the TH-58PZ700U/750U.

Here is a viewing chart which shows optimum viewing distances for 1080p and 720p. Based on this chart, at 11 to 12 feet from a 58 inch screen, you'd be just at the optimum distance for a 720p HDTV (136.51 inches = 11.375 feet). The optimum seating distance from a 58", 1080p set is 91.01 inches or 7.58. I doubt you'd gain anything by going 1080p. IF you expect to never sit any closer to the screen, you could save money with a 720p HDTV.

Here are a couple of more tutorials to consider before making your decision.

Maxing Out Resolution

Viewing Distance and Screen Size

So using the charts, if you are sitting 11-12 feet away, you could go with an 84" to 92" diagonal 1080p display!

Or if you want to go 720p, you would be at 56" to 61" diagonal.

I have a front projector that does 720p at 104" and I think that it looks amazing at about 14 feet.

AT that seating distance I vote for “NO”, you wont see a difference in pixel structure. I’d be more concerned with color and contrast.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Yes it is!

This is a great chart- thanks John for sharing.

Yeah, cool chart!

Where'd you get it?

Seeing as how I have an 88" screen that I'm about 12-14 feet back from, I may use that graph to explain to Mrs. Medic8r why we need to upgrade our PannyAE900 to something that'll do 1080p!

wow, looks like I need a 1440p projector!

Great chart! Looks like I picked mine just right .

Huh. So at 8 ft or so, there's no sense to a 40" 1080p (or even i) screen. Eeenteresting.

The one aspect that is not represented in the chart is "show-off factor". When you just gotta have the biggest and best, science simply does not count .

It figures. My 720p system (>100" diagonal, 12 foot viewing distance) could benefit from 1440p, while my buddy chips' 1080p system (60" diagonal, 10-12 foot viewing distance) barely needs 720p.

Bah !!

Now it looks like I need to get me one of those Toshiba XA2 HD-DVD players to make my SD DVDs look better.

This is nuts

Thanks a lot for your comments.

This is the display I am getting:

http://reviews.cnet.com/flat-panel-and-plasma/panasonic-th-58px600u/4505-6482_7-31813549.html

58" Panny plasma

Doesn't support 1080p res. , and I probably wouldn't need a display that does support it.

Looks like a fine choice Paul. I pulled up the geek box on this TV.

TEST RESULT SCORE
Before color temp (20/80) 6965/6762K Good
After color temp 6425/6581K Good
Before grayscale variation +/- 281K Good
After grayscale variation +/- 97K Good
Color of red (x/y) 0.662/0.328 Average
Color of green 0.265/0.644 Poor
Color of blue 0.150/0.061 Good
Overscan 2.5 % Good
Black-level retention No stable pattern Poor
2:3 pull-down, 24fps Y Good
Defeatable edge enhancement Y Good

It looks good except for colour uniformity. I'm sensitive to off colours, and you may not be. I always recommend having a new display ISF calibrated to get rid of such problems. You need something like an accupel spectrometre to calibrate colours in the service menu hence the need for a trained pro. If you know your way around a Spyder TV you might want to try it yourself but its a dangerous tweak if you are a newbie. Hiring a ISF calibrator is the best $300 investment you could make to get maximum enjoyment from this neat plasma tv.

Thanks mdrew, I'll check out the 1000u and compare it to the JVC-RS1.

I'll take your PannyAE900 when you no longer need it.

Hello Paul,

As I read through these posts, assuming you'd get a 1080p display, my first thought was to ask you if you could sit closer. Otherwise, at your proposed viewing distance, you'd be hard-pressed to discern any difference between the 720p and 1080p displays. I base this on my side-by-side viewing of 720p vs. 1080p displays at the last CES show in Las Vegas.

And while Jakeman's suggestion that the 1080p displays may have superior contrast ratio, luminosity and colour uniformity, many of these benefits are only visible with test patterns. With regular programming--moving pictures we're speaking of here--from HD-DVD or Blu-Ray or HD broadcasts, those benefits may not be visible.

It's similar to doing lab measurements on, say, a CD player or modest Universal DVD player's low low-level linearity of its internal D-to-A converter vs a multi-mega-buck external D-to-A converter. While you can measure the differences at -80 dB to -100 dB, and, using headphones at ridiculous gain levels, actually hear them with some critical material, in real-life playback at even high volume with speakers in a listening room, do you hear them? Nope. I've done those measurements and listening tests of a portable CD player vs a separate tweaky $10,000 D/A converter and they sound identical.

It's an interesting philosophical argument: should one invest in technology that delivers superior technical performance in a lab test but is inaudible in listening tests?

Regards,

mdrew,

There are very thorough reports by Al Griffiin on three 1080p projectors, Epson, Panasonic and Sharp, in the June issue of Sound&Vision magazine. Al Griffin is perhaps even more critical of video quality than I am, but in a different way. He is more of the Joe Kane/ISF school that everything should look film, including HD broadcasts of sports, nature, etc. which in my view simply doesn't apply to original video HD. The latter has a "pop," contrast, and visual punch that the ISF guys don't seem to acknowledge.

There are also tests of three other 1080p projectors (JVC, Mitsubishi and Sony) in the June issue of Home Theater magazine. I don't know if all or any of these are available on-line.

Regards,

Greetings Alan

It is indeed tough to distinguish the difference between the same model displays if you are sitting at the optimal distance based on resolution. However resolution is not the most important property for discerning image quality. Displays vary considerably in how well they perform and the geek box above provides a partial summary of several important parameters. Not everyone will be sensitive to those properties, my wife for example cannot tell SD from HD while my son seems to know when I change a gamma setting.

ISF ranks contrast ratio, colour uniformity, greyscale and colour accuracy and finally resolution as the most important factors affecting image quality. I would also add luminosity to that list, especially for HT applications.

In my opinion, luminosity and contrast ratio are the two most important properties which distinguish a good from not so good display and are very discernable. Images from a high lumen output projector with a very high contrast ratio will be much more visually appealing that a dimmer display with lower contrast, all other properties being the same. Its the main reason why the much acclaimed JVC-RS1 is on my short list for projector upgrade. Though I have concerns that the JVC will not track greyscale as linearly or have as accurate colours as my existing 720p Sim2 HT300e projector.

Moreover not all displays track greyscale in as linear fashion. If there ever was an analogy to audio, its greyscale tracking with speaker frequency response. The more linear with less delta error, the better colour and black detail reproduction. Not all displays excel in this important performance area which does lead to visible differences in image quality in side by side comparisons. The higher the error in greyscale tracking the more image quality degrades. When it comes to colour, I have to admit to being quite sensitive to proper hue and saturation. Not many displays reproduce 701 and 601 colour gamuts accurately. Overblown reds and unrealistic greens can be are very distracting. Underperforming displays and many displays our of the box have oversaturated colours. Green hair highlights in particular bug me.

Motion artifacts, which are an outcome of video processing, are another area which are visible the larger the screen. The list of video properties/artifacts which are discernable is rather lengthy. Resolution is not that important compared to some of those mentioned above.

That is why I suggest that the main benefit of 1080p displays is not that it is higher resolution than say 720p, its that for the most part there have been technological and design improvements in the other more important properties. In our household, I use my sons who have better hearing and eyesight than me to do blind tests ( no pun intended ) and they seem to be adroit at spotting visual artifacts or inaccuracies.

As for DACs, well you know my view: quality DACs make an audible difference. I was at a friends place last week and we were A/B ing some tunes through a Krell Showcase pre and a Proceed AVP2 and the sonic signature was quite apparent between the two and when we switched digital and analog inputs with each processor.

You ask a great philosophical question and it is difficult to generalize. To me specs and listening go hand in hand and while great specs are no assurance that there will be an audible difference, I'm in the camp that better specs cumulatively usually translate into superior performance.

Thanks Alan, I’ll have to look at that one. I found the sight where I saw that review I mentioned earlier, but now it’s not posted. It was at Cene4home.com, but it was in German and now their sight is international, so I don’t know what happened to the RS1 – Pany 1000 shootout. Here’s some discussion about that at AVS though (where I first found this information).

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=849695&page=1&pp=60

I’ve had the 1000U for about three months now. It’s got just over 200 hours on the bulb. At fist I was wondering why I bought it because I wasn’t dazzled with it after having the Pany 900 and was expecting some miraculous improvement going from 720P to 1080P. But then I got to playing with the different modes and took my time calibrating it the best I could with the Avia disk and have grown to love the thing. Right out of the box I could tell a difference in picture quality, but it wasn’t related to resolution. Panasonic’s smooth screen pretty much eliminates screen door, so noticing a resolution difference between the 900 and 1000 is pretty tough. It’s there, but you have to be about 12” away to see the difference. Where I see the biggest difference (to the better with the 1000) is color, contrast and sharpness. The 1000 is a big step in improved contrast. Dark scenes with shadows are so much better it’s almost silly. With the 900 I missed a lot of detail because everything looked dark. With the 1000, I see details in the dark parts of the image that I didn’t before. It’s very hard to describe this difference, but once you see it, everything “PoPs” out at you. The 1000 is brighter than the 900 as well, so don’t believe the na-sayers that say this is a “dim” projector (and yes I know the bulb is newer than the one in the 900, but not much) 500 hours verses 200 hours). I don’t know what these light canon worshipers are thinking when they start shooting of Lumen numbers and square foot Lambert BS. Hell, one “expert” told me I needed 18 lumens per square foot of screen. Crap, at that rate I’d need to watch movies with sunglasses on. There are times when the 1000 is too dam bright as is, and I have to shut my eyes for them to re-adjust when the scene goes from dark to light.

So to end this ramble, folks need to pay close attention to REAL contrast. It a much more significant difference than resolution. I think this is a fairly good argument for going with Plasma over LCD. LCD has the edge over Plasma in regards to resolution, but Plasma tends to have better color and contrast.