soundberry Quale risoluzione oggi?

In our recent CEDIA 2006 show review I concluded with some thoughts on the relative merits of 1080p vs. 720p home theater projectors. If you already read that review you have seen the comments below. However, I decided to excerpt the last part of the CEDIA review and repost that information as a separate article to make it more visible to readers who may not be interested in the CEDIA wrap-up.

The big question is this: Now that prices on 1080p projectors have dropped into a range that is accessible by many consumers, will you be better off to go with the new 720p resolution projectors, or should you step up in budget and performance to one of the 1080p products?

Despite all of the hype over the 1080p format, for many buyers this fall the best solution will be to go with one of the new 720p projectors. There are several reasons for this. First, if your viewing material is primarily standard definition DVD and sports on broadcast HDTV, the 1080p projectors will give you almost nothing in image quality that the 720p projectors don't already give you. All HD sports broadcasts from Fox, ESPN, and ABC are in native 720p, and they will look as clear and razor sharp as they can possibly look when displayed on a native 720p projector. The additional resolution of a 1080p projector won't make HD sports broadcasts look any higher in actual resolution since the signals are limited to 720 lines of video information per frame.

Meanwhile, standard definition DVD (in the NTSC world) has only 480 lines of video per frame. On a 720p projector, the DVD signal is rescaled to 720 lines, and on a 1080p projector it is rescaled to 1080 lines. Assuming the use of a high quality upscaling DVD player or video processor, there is the potential that the 1080p image will look very slightly better than the 720p picture. However, the difference will not be dramatic, and in many cases it will not even be noticeable even in a side by side viewing. The reason is that DVD picture quality is fundamentally limited by the fact that there are only 480 lines per frame of video information in the source. So the DVD source cannot use the full resolution power of either a 720p or a 1080p projector.

Now—though standard definition DVD and HD sports broadcasts are what a lot of projector users are primarily interested in, that may not be you. A lot of prime time television programming on CBS, NBC, and other networks is broadcast in 1080i. The new 1080p projectors do have the potential to make this type of programming incrementally sharper than it will appear on most 720p projectors. There will not be a night and day difference, since 1080i signals compressed into 720p displays already look extremely good. But there is the potential for a slightly sharper image from HDTV 1080i broadcasts when using a 1080p projector.

Practically speaking, the most important new video sources that let you get the most out of a 1080p projector are the new high definition DVD formats, HD-DVD and Blu-ray, which are both native 1080p sources. HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs pack a full 1920x1080 resolution per frame of video, and they look their best when displayed on a native 1080p projector or flat panel display. The early adopters of these technologies are the ones who will derive the most immediate benefit from 1080p projectors in the short run. If you consider yourself to be a videophile or a serious hobbyist who spends money to stay out on the cutting edge of video technology, the new flock of 1080p projectors represent a whole new world of opportunity to upgrade your home theater that you won't want to miss.

The bottom line is that 1080p projectors are better and less expensive than ever. Many buyers who want the very best will jump at the change to order one of the new 1080p models now that they are within manageable price ranges. However, the large majority of consumers should not allow themselves to be distracted or consumed by the hype over 1080p—the powerful 720p projectors to hit the market this fall will be the best deals by far for the typical consumer who rents DVDs and watches Sunday sports and Monday Night Football. Either way, if you have not yet stepped up to the experience of very large screen (100" diagonal and larger) home theater, there has never been a better time to do it.