Sean Mota said:
I had been without internet all mroning. But I was able to confirm that Ken H was wrong. He has his agenda but for HD Channels under contract that required resolution at 1920x1080i VOOM is doing those. The others are set to 1440x1080i. So Ken H was plainly wrong!!!!!!!
Never ceases to amaze me how so many place so much emphasis on "resolution", especially the higher end of the scale such as 1920 vs. 1280.
I wonder how many realize that 1920 can never be passed to your eyes in nearly all cases. Most monitors are the final resolution limiting device and will barely work beyond 1280, especially in a digital display where the native resolution is restricted. People using analog displays that can spec out at 1920 such as certain 9" CRT FPTV's don't operate them to reach that spec anyway because the image is too dim.
Anyway, I don't want to toot Ken's trumpet on this but I do respect his background for getting to the truth. I suspect that the truth is lost on the translations of all this. When someone says, we pass the resolution as it is received, doesn't mean that they specifically resample the content to a lower resolution or don't resample. It may mean that the resolution capability of a D5 master at 1920 is simply lost by the time all the video is processed by the system. You can shoot a video with softfx filtering on the lens as is done by many film camera DP's and the detail in the image is just not there. It effectively becomes reduced to little more than 1000 h lines in the 1920 capable master. I once asked Bob Ross of CBS about this and he agreed that the CBS network productions, being done on film were not only softened but the recordings on D5 contained no physical data in the higher resolution regions due to nothing there in the film itself.
I feel that until we, as consumers are using certified monitors that spec out to screen native resolution of 1920 pixels there is no cause for concern. While these monitors are now out and available for purchase, few people have them. In addition, we will begin to see more and more video production for HDTV being shot with HDCAMs (1440) and HDV(1280) and DVCProHD(1280) content which will record to tape no higher than 1280 anyway. All the bellyaching about a provider restricting resolution to 1280 on all programming is nothing more than a good move to conserve signal bandwidth from system noise. I'll complain when all program sources are nothing less than 1920 and post production is maintained at 1920 and distribution media is 1920 and we all use 1920 native displays. That will be way off in the future at this point because the industry is settling in on a mean figure of 1280 as the standard for HDTV horizontal resolution IN ALL CASES! Yes, JVC tried to redefine a format for lower than that but it didn't fly so with HDV and DVCPRO being the bottom of the industry practice at 1280, I think we all should feel happy if the system can maintain that. It is a good compromise. Arguing about the region between 1280 and 1920 is rediculous considering the entire infrastructure of our media.
PS - to some who don't understand the spec, when a monitor says it can receive the 1080ix1920 signal, it doesn't mean the display will resolve it. It just means that the monitor can scan and process that signal frequency in the circuitry.
