Do you need 1080p?

If you've been shopping for an HDTV, you've no doubt seen the 1080p spec tossed around. This stands for a progressive scan display at a 1920x1080 resolution. Many argue that this simply isn't necessary if your screen is too small or if you sit far enough away. There is more involved however.

I suggest you check out this excellent article at The Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity. It includes an excellent discussion of interlacing/deinterlacing, the 60Hz interlaced NTSC system, upscaling/downscaling, 3:2 pulldown, 24p film to 60i conversion and how all this relates to 1080p. If you find yourself confused by a lot of these topics, it's an excellent primer.

Three comments I found of interest...

"there is an abundance of 1080p24 material out there, encoded into 1080i60 format. If you want to view it at its full potential, you need not only a device capable of displaying it, a so called 1080line TV, but the ability to actually de-interlace it properly."

"if you want to view the inherently 1080p24 content which is out there (and even native 1080i content) with maximum resolution (and we maintain that an enthusiast who sets up their viewing environment to get the most out of it can see the difference), you need a display capable of 1080p that keeps the signal in a 1080 line format from input to display surface."

"when scaling up, more resolution can be of pretty significant advantage in the preservation of fine detail, even with low resolution sources."

Considering that we still watch a lot of standard definition content these days, this last point is an important one.

If you want to know if you should go 1080p with your next set, this article will point out that the answer is a definitive YES!