Quote Originally Posted by jjp735i
I bought into the BR player and I don't see much a difference from my blue ray to DVD, both pluged into a plasma 1080i tv via HDMI. I also have a plasma 720p and I don't see much difference between 1080i and 720p. Maybe if you walk up close to the tv you can see the differences, but who the heck sits that close to 50 and 60" tvs.. So does that make me a moron. I personally think blue ray is BS.
Sorry, but Blu-ray is not BS. It's one thing to say that the difference is negligible, or that it's not worth the fuss. Those views I can respect. But, saying there's no visible difference? Unless there's a problem with the setup, even with a 720p plasma, the difference is obvious at an 8' viewing distance.

BTW, unless you plasma dates back to the late 1990s, it's not native 1080i. All plasma sets built since that time are native progressive.

Quote Originally Posted by GMichael
BR is 1080p. Without a 1080p display, you wouldn't see much difference.
Actually even with a "720p" HDTV, you will see a considerable difference with a Blu-ray. My parents have a 50" 720p plasma, and I ran several comparisons. Even they could see the difference between a Blu-ray and DVD. Of course, they don't really care about the difference -- they just like that nice big picture, regardless of whether or not it looks fuzzy.

Quote Originally Posted by pixelthis
DON'T WANT TO GET INTO THIS AGAIN, but a 1080i pic loses half of its rez when things are moving. WHICH knocks it down to roughly 540 lines, which isn't really that much different
from the 480p that a DVD player puts out.
Nope, that's just flat out wrong. Do you REALLY think that a 1080i HD broadcast looks no different than a DVD? Or that the 720p signals transmitted by ABC and Fox are visibly superior to the 1080i signals on CBS and NBC?

1080i simply means that native progressive frames are created by merging two interlaced frames together to create a 1,920 x 1,080 pixel image. This deinterlacing process creates 30 progressive images per second. This is the resolution equivalent of a 1080p30 signal (native resolution of 1080i60), that gets frame-repeated to sync up with the 60 Hz video standard.

The issues with 1080i have nothing to do with the resolution, but rather the artifacts and picture anomalies that can crop up during the deinterlacing process with a less-than-optimal source and/or inferior video processor. The advantage of 720p/1080p sources is that there are fewer processing steps along the way that can impact the picture quality.

Keep in mind that the DVD format is a native 480i format, not 480p. A progressive scan DVD player outputs to 480p using the EXACT same deinterlacing process used to display a 1080i signal. By your logic, are you saying that the DVD format is really only 240 lines?