After finding out the 50" plasma i bought last week is only 768p and not the 1080i I thought it was, I'm looking at the possibility of exchanging it for another one. The tv I have at the moment is a Samsung PS50C96HDX and I bought it for a steal at £760. How much extra am I looking at for a 1080i/p 50 incher and do you think its worth it???
nah its 768p. I thought it was 1080i but if you read the small print it says it "supports" 1080i, which means you can input a 1080i source and it will downscale it to 768p. It was on currys for £900 about a week ago (i think it has since gone back up) and then I used discount codes i found online to drop it down to £760.
do you have any need for 1080p anyway? All screens accept up to 1080i as this is interlaced and not progressive. At that price i would be happy with what you have got as your looking at double that for a 1080p plasma
when i was doing my research into buying a hdtv, I heard the difference between a 720p image and anything 1080 is quite vast. Not that I use anything HD at the moment and it looks like the bootleg hddvd's on the internet are mainly 720p but after spending so much of my hard earned money on it I don't want to be gutted in the future. But yes you are correct, I paid such a good price for it I'm really considering keeping it even though its not what I was originally after.
1080i and 1080p are too vastly different things. There's no such thing as a 1080i screen (it's just a signal type) - the Hitachi screens sort of possibly being the exception. Any TV (whether it has a 1920x1080 or 1024x768 or 1366x768 panel) has to process 1080i to fill in the missing lines (interlaced signals only send alternate odd or even lines each scan) How good a job that processing does creating a full frame picture is far more important than how many pixels the panel happens to have. So you do have a "1080i screen". It always means, "this TV can accept 1080i" Whereas when people talk about 1080p screens, they nearly always mean a screen that has 1920x1080 pixels, rather than a screen that will accept a 1080p signal (which by the way your Samsung won't, but the PX70 will) It can be confusing but that's pretty much all there is to it, until you start to ask whether it will take 1080p/24 or just 1080p/60 For movies, that's maybe true. A proper 1080p film frame can be rebuilt from a 1080i signal. For video, it's not. 720p and 1080i contain roughly the same number of pixels. I really wouldn't get too hung up on the numbers, there's a lot of 1080p screens out there which are like a Corsa with a supercharger. Yes it's got a shedload of horsepower but the brakes and suspension aren't going to keep the thing on the road.