News Paramount moving to Blu-Ray too?

Although Fox, in all their infinite wisdom have decided to encode all of their recent releases in MPEG2.

 

^QFT. I read somewhere that the reason given by the studios is (washjob), "when piracy gets to the point where it's necessary, we'll turn it on." lol. More like, "we'll lose sales because everyone just bought a last-gen HDTV on closeout, and we can't get them to buy another one next week that has the new version HDMI ports from this week in order to be able to display properly with lock-and-key copy-protection!"

I'm not suprised. Title to title difference. I have a copy of Final Fantasy: Spirits Within on BR, that was an earlier MPEG2 encode...and it looks amazing. It's like painting; it doesn't necessarily matter what you're painting with, as long as it comes out looking good!

 

I can display 1080p on my 19" LCD monitor. and there is a slightly noticeable differenece between 720p and 1080p. i am very close to it but just regular distance in how you use a pc monitor.

you shouldnt need 1080p? <40" its not noticeable? ya right. how far do you think you should be away? 30feet?

many people cant im sure but any techy person should easily be able to tell the difference.

 

In sizes 32 and below it is hard to tell the difference, easy to a trained eye, and not really worth the extra cost. If 40 and above there is a huge difference, and most people cannot tell because they really aren't comparing 2 tvs from the same source, but at different resolutions. Basically if you go to a store, and you look at to sets next to eachother, if they are all running the same images, they are all running a 1080i source, so you can't really see the ability of a 1080p unless it is an ultra high-end set that is built with very good upscaling abilities under the hood. If I hooked up two tvs, one 40inch that is 1080p and its older counterpart that was 720p, and ran let's just say Transformers on them both, you would totally see the difference. Edges would be clearer, details would be more pronounced, and the sense of depth to the image would be increased.

 

Well, so much for porn deciding the fate of the universe then.

But if it breaks or scratches easily we have to buy another copy = increased sales . Actually I think the reason is that those disks cost significantly less than flash-RAM etc.

Ask anyone running a 30" monitor (almost twice the res of 1080p) if they'd prefer a lower resolution. I'm running my computer desktop at 3840 x 2048 and I Love the resolution - a 1080p TV would be just over a quarter of that resolution. I realise it's not exactly the same thing as a TV but I think the lines between monitors & TVs are being blurred and are stepping into each other's territories. It would not surprise me to see TVs that upscale from 1080p - maybe not for 10 or more years but they are coming.

Since when has reality played into their game plan?

Edit: for full 1080p you need at least a 24" monitor - 20" - 22" ones are close but not close enough.
20->22"=1680*1050
24->28"=1920*1200
1080pTV=1920*1080

 

my monitor has hdcp and when i do 1080p it says 'recommended resolution is 1680x1050' but if i go in the menu it says it is 1920x1080 @ 60Hz.

 

Monitors and TVs are completely different, you're supposed to sit a lot closer to a monitor than you are a TV, and increased resolution has way more benefits on a PC than it does on a TV, namely, lots more room to put stuff on screen.

5x the height of the screen, that how far you're meant to be sitting away, a bigger TV means you're meant to sit further away.

 

True but as I said I think the lines are getting blurred. For years I have used a monitor as a TV and I've seen several people use HDTVs as monitors.

Also - I think it's like anything else: movie special effects that looked so realistic 5-10 years ago are now easy to spot and don't look that real at all; same with graphics, same with sound quality, ... Once you get used to higher quality your ability to see / hear / taste / smell (I'm thinking wine experts with the last two)... the difference increases beyond what you might even have thought possible. The human brain has an amazing ability to adapt and trained senses can be quite phenomenal. If we train our eyes & brains with higher resolutions we will easily be able to spot the difference and appreciate even higher resolutions.

Could I be wrong? - quite possibly, but let's wait and see what the next new standard will be in ten years.

 

The point is, though, that there is physiological limit of human visual acuity - we can resolve down to approximately 1 arc-minute of resolution. Many people make the mistake of saying that this means the human eye can't discern 1080p from 720p on a screen less than a certain size, but of course this is only true if the viewing distance is fixed - obviously a 40" screen at 5m viewing distance looks smaller than a 50" screen at 5m, but a 40" screen at 4m looks exactly the same size as a 50" at 5m, in that it fills exactly the same proportion of your vision.

Now, recommended viewing distance for standard def content is approx 5 times the height of the screen, and it can be shown by very simple trigonometry that at 5x screen height one pixel of a 1080p display describes just 0.64 arc-minutes of your field of view, while one pixel of a 720p display will describe 0.95 arc-minutes. As such, at 5x screen height, it is probably quite accurate to say that the additional resolution of 1080p is not discernable.

For high def content, however, you could easily have a viewing distance of, say, 3 times the screen height, either by buying a bigger TV or by sitting closer to it. In this case, a single pixel at 1080p describes 1.06 arc-minutes, while at 720p you're looking at 1.59. As such, a person with good eyesight should be able to discern the difference at that viewing distance. For a 50" screen this translates to a viewing distance of around 5'4" (1.63m); at 46" it should be 4'11" (1.50m); for a 40" TV 3x height = 4'3" (1.30m).

The final piece of the puzzle is that most "720p" TVs actually have a weird resolution of 1366 x 768 or similar, so every image has to either be put through some unnatural scaling factor or will not fill the entire screen. 1080p sets, however, have a resolution of exactly 1920x1080, so 1080i/p content exactly fills the screen (with the TV's 1:1 pixel mapping enabled), while 720p content has to be scaled at a relatively round factor of 1.5:1. This should result in a sharper image for both 1080p and 720p content on a good, well calibrated 1080p screen compared to a 720p screen, regardless of how well set up the latter may be. Whether this is noticeable to the average person, who seems to wander around the world with his eyes shut, I don't know. I do know that the difference is quite apparent to me, as a perfectionist and videophile who notices details.