Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Which gives better picture...720p or 1080i?

How do you tell or force either the tv or the dvd player to do the upconversion? What I mean is....how do you know if the tv is doing the upconversion or the player? I'm still trying to find images showing differences between 480p, 720p, and 1080i. I know most people are saying they can't tell a difference between 720p and 1080i, but how much better is 1080i over 480p or even 540p?

Usually the upconversions are done through menus on the DVD players and I believe most TV's will upconvert depending on the setting you choose when setting it up as well. I find if I go into Best Buy or Future Shop I can usually get the salesperson to let me have the remote and from there I can check the TV settings and every so often I am able to get a hold of the DVD or source remote as well, then I can check its settings also.

1080i and 720P are waaaaayyy better than 480P. Think about it, almost twice as much information in a 720P signal as a 480P(240 extra lines actually)) and 1080i(540 drawn twice to get the interlacing)has an additional 60 lines of resolution times 2 for an extra 120 lines. On a big screen it is very noticable, especially a few feet away. The farther back you go the less you can pick out, which is why the bigger you go, the higher the resolution you need, as the eye starts picking out the pixels because the pixel size would need to grow to accomodate the larger screen, if it were to stay at the same resolution as the smaller screen.

Sounds to me like to need to go to one of the local stores and have the salesman give you a demonstration. No doubt that there is a huge difference!!!

Ok, maybe I shouldn't worry too much about 720p vs 1080i at the moment and just upgrade from my 480p to get the best my display can handle. I think I'm gonna have to buy one of those Oppos to get 1080i on my 50 inch display and just keep the 480p for maybe intro dvd or cd player. Looks like I'm gonna have to start another thread between the differences in Oppos. Agghhh!!!

My experience with my projector, which is native 720p, is that 720p looks much better using either my Panasonic upconverting DVD player, or my HTPC. Matching the resolution 1:1 gives me better results. I've tried 1080i, but the picture does not look as nice, in my opinion.

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The DVD players have menu options to control the outputs. My Pioneer 578 doesn't support upscaling or HDMI so my only options are to set the component outputs to "progressive" or "interlaced". If the player did support upscaling then I would also have menu options to choose output resolution.

I have not had a chance to A/B between an Oppo and a more typical player but my understanding is that you would see a slight but noticeable difference in difficult scenes, eg. diagonal lines or edges. In these scenes the Faroujda processor apparently does a better job of filtering the edges, giving you a smoother image while retaining sharpness.

I have seen that effect when playing with other digital filtering chips (including our own graphics chips) -- more taps and better algorithms do make a noticeable difference in image quality.