| |
|
Do I want 1080i or 1080p? What's the difference? Should I care?
The 'i' and 'p' after those numbers stand for 'interlaced' and 'progressive scan'. There was a decent Wikipedia entry explaining this stuff, but I've not kept the link, so you'll have to do with my garbled explanation for now. Unless somebody else can explain it more clearly after this post.
You know how your regular TV kind of draws the picture line-by-line, but so fast that you can't see it doing so? I think this is why when you see tv sets in films and television shows they have that weird flickery thing going on. Anyway, an interlaced picture is one where the set is only drawing every other line of the image during a single refresh. On its second pass, it'll draw the other half of the lines. Again, your eyes don't notice this happening and fill in the blanks for you, making the two images into one.
A progressive scan image draws all of the lines of the image in a single pass. You're getting the full resolution as it should be, rather than half of the resolution pretending to be the full thing by fooling your crappy human brain.
1080p is pointless for your 360 gaming needs right now, because the hardware doesn't currently support it (and, obviously, nor does any of the software). I suppose you might want to think about it in terms of future-proofing your investment - the 360 is, apparently, going to do 1080p at some point in the future and the PS3 already does, but personally I'm not at all fussed. I mean, it's a 26" set I've got here, I doubt I'd really notice the difference unless I had a screen the size of... I dunno, the moon or something.
The other things you'll want to check out if you're looking at different sets is the basic tech behind them. I've got an LCD set, but there are plasma screens and, er, others. I can't remember, because I only gave the others a cursory look, due to them being far more expensive than the LCD ones. Oh, and you *can* get CRT sets - cathode ray tube, like your regular standard def telly - that output a high def image, but they're generally fucking enormous or else not brilliantly reliable. Cheaper, but still not cheap enough that you wouldn't notice the money getting sucked from your wallet, so you might as well pay that bit more for something sturdier and less.. well, less bloody huge.
Things to keep an eye on when measuirng different LCD sets against each other:
Response time. This'll be measured in milliseconds and reflects how badly affected the screen is by after-images. If you've played on a PSP, you'll understand. You know how the fast-moving games on that machine all look like they employ a motion blur effect? They don't. It's just that the screen's got a shitty response time. Afaik, a general rule of thumb is that anything higher than 12 or 14ms isn't going to be suitable for gaming, because the image will be a blurry mess. I know this bit first-hand - before I bought the new telly, I tried playing the 360 through my PC monitor. Dead or Alive 4 ended up confuising my eyes, the response time of the screen was so poor (30ms, or something like that). More that alright for using PC applications, bollocks for playing anything with half a pulse on.
LCD screens also have a bit of a problem with colour depth. It's most noticable with blacks and greys, where the screen won't distinguish between them as effectively as a good old standard def CRT can. That's just something that you have to learn to put up with, but there's another specification that'll help you out here. You need to look for the contrast ratio - on my set, it's 3000:1. Don't ask whether a higher ratio is better than a lower one, because I can't remember - you'll want to search around online tech sites before spending the cash. All this stuff does make a difference, so it's well worth being informed.
Oh, and inputs. You'll want to make sure you've got the right inputs on the back of the thing and the right number of them. A proper HD set will either have an HDMI input or else it'll support HDCP over DVI. HDMI is some kind of security thingy that's apparently going to be used to copy-protect HD material, so making sure that the set you plump for does either of those. They're both the same thing, just require different cables.
REmains to be seen whether or not that makes any odds, though. I thought that the PS3 was meant to be using HDMI, but that's not been the case so far as far as I can tell. It's the movie studios that have been making the biggest noise about it, but when you consider that tvs bought more than something like eighteen months ago don't have HDMI functionality, you've got to wonder if they'll bother or not. Are they really going to piss off all those people who bought into the HD revolution earlier than a year and a half back? Doubt it.
If it helps any, this is the one I ended up buying. The only problems I've had are that the speakers aren't great - which doesn't matter, because I just plug the audio outputs from whatever I'm playing on it into my hi-fi instead - and it doesn't like displaying a 4:3 image at the correct ratio on certain gaming machines. This, though, might be something to do with those machines, rather than the screen - I'm still trying to figure that one out. rotational's got the exact same set as me and hasn't encountered this issue himself, so it's either than my tv's screwed or there's something wrong with a couple of my consoles.
Otherwise, it's great. Fucking thig's come down in price by a ton in the space of six months, but never mind. |
|
|
