720p / 1080i on a 768 pixel panel? I'm worried!

D

d.brophy

Guest
If I buy an HD ready plasma now (1366x768), will it be able to display a 1080i signal? Will there be scaling issues? Surely I need a 1080pixel panel... but then 720 would be scaled to fit in! And if I display a 720p signal on a 768 pixel panel, will there be 48 pixels of dead space at the top/bottom, or will it scale it?

I'm just a bit worried because my LCD computer monitor looks awful if you feed it anything except its native resolution...
 
Scaling technology fitted in STB's and Plasma/LCD are far more advanced and flexible than a PC monitor, you should have not real worries either upscaling a 720p source or down scaling a 1080i source as required.
Obviously native resolution is always the preferred option but that ain't gonna happen all the time, it may be that the STB or HD-DVD/Blu-ray themselves will make a better job of scaling/deinterlacing than the panel could anyway.
 
Scaling is quite a pre-occupation in these forums, and not just because of the prospects and implications of High Definition. Whatever the medium, most current video sources are 480 lines interlaced (NTSC) or 576 lines interlaced (PAL/SECAM). Although most plasma screens so far only have 480 lines, this is not much use in this country, and I don't believe any have 576 lines, so some scaling is usually necessary. Even if you play a DVD on you PC, the video card will up-scale the 576 to whatever the display is, and probably do it rather well.

All flat panel screens have the same capability, and whether they have 480, 720, 768, or 1024 lines of native resolution, I think they all claim to be able to accept a 1080 line input. (Not that it makes them hi-def ready, however.) So all plasmas scale their inputs, but they don't usually do it very well, and if you want to see the sort of video fidelity you see on your PC monitor, you would probably need to use a proprietary external scaler or a home theatre PC. There are forums here for both subjects that will tell you more than you could possibly endure.
 

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