Anyone watching PAL SDTV on 640x480?

O

olee

Guest
Is there anyone out there who is watching PAL tv shows (SDTV) on 640x480 resolution LCD TVs? How does it look?

At amazon.de and in many local shops here there are several reduced priced LCD tvs, that have only a 640x480 resolution. I think this is OK for NTSC (using 480i), but is not ideal for PAL (using 576i), as the number of physical pixels on the LCD is smaller than that is broadcasted, therefore the picture has to be shrinked or "under-polated" to be displayed.

Like the Toshiba 20VL43 P 20-Zoll LCD-TV, would be ideal for me, except this resolution thing. Link: Toshiba 20VL43 P 20-Zoll LCD-TV

I would mainly use the LCD-TV for watching normal TV programmes (80% of the use), for Playstation 2 (10%), and for watching DivX movies from my laptop (10%).

I have the impression, that also for the Playstation 2, that in Europe uses PAL, the 640x480 resolution is not enough.

Any comments are welcomed.
 
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480 lines is not enough to display all the detail of PAL, but most standard definition CRT's arn't good enough to display all the resolution anyway so you probably wouldn't notice any problem until you compare it with a higher definition screen. 640x480 is a computer screen. PAL uses 720x576 and NTSC uses 720x480, but this is not square pixel. For square pixel 4:3, PAL needs to be scaled to 788x576 and 16:9 scaled to 1050x576, so these are the minimum number of pixels requred to display PAL video at source resolution.
 
Thanks for the explication on the resolution, it was quite helpful.

But if there is anyone, who is watching PAL on a 640x480 resolution LCD-TV, I would be really happy for some feedback on his/her experiences.
 
The results would depend very much on the scaling the particular TV performs on the PAL signal. I have a Sharp 15" LCD and it's pretty dire subjectively, but fine as a kitchen set. I also have a 22" Sharp LCD and that is much better, but again not a patch on my PDP or a good CRT..
 

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