It's not looking good if you have either a television that supports only 720p, or 1080i if you want to use the PS3 to the maximum that it is capable of (ie. HD gaming & HD bluray) you are going to need a television that supports 1080p. Unfortunately I can't justify the cost of buying a 1080P television right now when most of the shows broadcast now (and probably for the foreseable future) won't be taking advantage of 1080p. If you want to watch Bluray on the PS3 and have only a television that supports 720p (my Mitsubishi DLP for example) than I will only be able to watch the show at the downscaled resolution of 480p (basically standard DVD quality) but I will be able to play the games (ie. Resisitance Fall of man) in HD. But if you have a television (most older CRT rear projection HD sets) that only supports 1080i & not 720p you won't be playing the game in HD since it will downscale the game to 480p and not upscale to 1080i.

From what it sounds like Sony doesn't know what is going on, and it appears they may not be able to fix this w/ a firmware release for the PS3.

Link here;
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5076

 

great!

 

heard about this since day 2

 

Pos

 

For me, it was the perfect excuse to get a 1080p TV.

 

smart man

 

wait, blu-ray won't display at 720p?

 

No, it is the PS3 hardware/software that is not scaling to all resolutions.

 

same here

 

I am getting a 1080p TV anyway, so it doesn't matter to me... and I'll probably have the TV months before the PS3.

But the original post does not make sense. I have 2 friends who have 720p/1080i sets, one who has an old school RP floor model, and neither have had any problems with BluRay movies or PS3 games.

I also read the article. It makes it sound like only some TVs are affected. If my friends, who have TVs that are about ~4 years old aren't having any problems, the majority of people should be fine.

.

 

seems odd, IF this is true.

 

It sounds exaggerated and blown out of proportion which is in line with most PS3 related articles and stories. If both of my friends' old, huge HDTV's are fine, I'm thinking 98%+ of the rest of the TV's are fine also...

 

But how do you know your freinds TV's aren't simply downscaling to 420P? Maybe I'm not quite understanding the original poster here.

 

B/C the picture is in HD just like the X360, which means it's 720p. If it was in 480p it would look completely different (plus, they'd be pitching fits!).

 

Remember kids PS3 was designed for 2010 and beyond. If it ain't working right for you, yep, its time to upgrade yo old sheit.

If you want to buy a bleeding-edge/new product and use old components with it, that's your problem and your choice - not Sony's. Would you buy a PCI-express video card for your AGP PC? Would you buy a new-gen SATA hard drive for your old skool PC? How about some Xenon bulbs for yo Pinto? Ya feelin' me?

 

PS4 will be out by 2010

 

It is 480p, but I guess we know what is on your mind

 

Here are the facts:

The PS3 has no internal scaler, so a TV needs to support the resolution the game displays at. For many PS3 games, they are created at 720p.

The issue is that many TV's don't support 720p resolution (mostly CRT HDTV's and CRT RPTV's - some of which are Sony models), so by default the game will be output to the lower supported resolution 480p.

The 360 by contrast has an internal scaler, so if your TV only supports 1080i, it will upscale the 720p game to 1080i or whatever resolution is set in the console settings.

The Blu-Ray issue is that Blu-Ray movies natively output at 1080i/1080p. This is more rare, but some 720p TV's don't support a 1080i/p input so the image does not appear.

Overall, by trying to save a few bucks by eliminating a scaler, Sony has a bad PR issue on their hands a few very unhappy gamers who paid $500-600 and can only play their games at 480p

 

I can't disagree w/ that.

 

And what I was getting at with JB, was just skeptism as to if what they were watching was actually 720p. But if you've seen it and they know what their doing then ok.

 

^ Yup, they know what they're doing. In fact, when I looked to buy my first TV a few years ago, they were the one's I turned to for info.

So again, if they are fine, I'm sure most people are fine.

 

How do you know it is HD?

If by "old HDTV's" you mean like, CRT-RPTV's, it's EXTREMELY hard to differentiate between high quality 480p content and 720p content. I have a 57" Sony CRT-RPTV and there is not an extreme difference between the 16:9 480p output from my DVD player and 720p/1080i content from my cable box.

And most of these older sets (mine included) don't give you any sort of confirmation on what you're actually viewing.

I'm fairly certain my set, a Sony - like i said, does not support 720p... only 1080i... and therefore would display at 480p.

My set is only 3-4 years old.


My point is, even if they know what they are doing... I think you'd be hard pressed to certify that you're watching 720p content over 480p content on a CRT-RPTV, ESPECIALLY if you've never seen said content in 720p before. The differences are even more subtle in the case of video game content.

 

Wouldn't 480 be a stretched picture where 720 would be naturally widescreen?

 

No.

Your DVD's are natively widescreen, aren't they? They're 480i, in a 16:9 (720x480) format (usually).

480 means 480 lines of vertical resolution, independent of horizontal resolution.

 

This is true, however, I can only take their word for it since they are in NY. I know they played Madden 2007 on both systems and said they look identicle. That was the only case where they could directly compare the X360 to the PS3... so one would assume that the TV is displaying the same resolution for both systems.

And, like you mentioned, if it's not (since there's no 100% way to verify), but both systems look the same on TV with the same game anyway, then that's even further proof that this whole thing is getting blown out of proportion as 99.9% of the people out there won't be able to tell the difference anyway...

 

Ya, I don't think it's a huge deal seeing 480p over 720p when it comes to video games on an older set.

The issue is a bigger deal on newer sets with fixed resolutions like LCD/Plasma. 480p content looks ass on a LCD with a fixed resolution of 1080i. This is, however, more rare than with the older sets.

The BIG issue is with Blu-ray content where the differences between HD/ED are certainly more evident.

The BIGGEST issue however is simply getting what you paid for. It's somewhat inexcusable that Sony wouldn't bundle a relatively cheap and ubiquitous scaler into such a high-end product. A product that, like Xbox, is supposed to be the do-all-end-all of home entertainment.

A scaler is something consumers simply EXPECT. It's a basic but necesarry component that's included on almost EVERY home entertainment device these days.

You wouldn't even buy a $99 DVD player if it lacked a scaler these days. Let alone a ~$600~ next-gen DVD++++ player.

 

^ Agreed. The biggest issue is the last point you made which is getting what you paid for. If people want to use that as their biggest gripe, it's totally legit. The other reasons to gripe, well, it's debatable as to how big of a deal they are.

Plus, like you said, it's very rare nowadays that this would be a problem. Most TV's purchased in the last 18-24 months or so should be OK as very few of them are native 1080i since most went the way of 720p. But, as also mentioned, it doesn't get Sony off the hook for not including a feature that should be part of a $600 unit...

 

so they said that it cant be fixed by a firmware update?

guess this means my next TV will be a 1080p set, and if sony releases a revision console with the fix time to break my PS3 and get walmart to replace it

 

720p/1080i sets should be fine too.

 

You mean if you have a set that supports BOTH? Yes.

 

I see the artical mentions scaling problems with Blue-ray as well, assuming thats movies that would be very bad for sets that can only do 720p max. It looks like you need a TV that does 1080i to get good HD quality or it turns down to 480p.

Personally I have a TV that does 720p/1080i and a VERY good DVD player that will convert with quality. I don't see any difference in picture quality between my DVD's and Blue-ray DVD's. I do see a difference if I down covert to 480p, but that's me and my eyes.

Quote from artical

 

How common is it for a TV to support 720p, and 1080i? Also, if a TV is marketed as full 1080p, does that include support for the aforementioned resolutions?

 

If you purchased a TV released in the last two years it had a very good chance that it does both 720p and 1080i. 1080p TV's only started appearing on the market about 10 months ago if that.

1080p sets will do 720p and 1080i. This is to support the HD broadcasting networks. I've done a lot of research awhile back and if I remember correctly Discovery HD broadcasts in 1080i where as other networks like ESPN HD may broadcast in 720p. The networks have already purchased expensive HD equipment forced to move forward with converting to HD signals within a few years from now.

I don't thinks these networks are willing to put up more money to broadcast in 1080p. Not many will. So buying a 1080p set, at least right now, won't get you much more then one that can do 720p and 1080i.

But with that said, the PS3 sure puts things in a jam for people who have TV's that only max out at 720p and can't produce a 1080i resolution.

 

My 1 year old LG does 480P/I, 720P, 1080i

 

It's a moot point but it should be noted in the last few posts that unless you have a CRT-based display your TV will not display BOTH 720p & 1080i (or 1080i at all for that matter).

It may (and likely will) accept a 1080i signal and deinterlace/scale it appropriately (to 720p or another WXGA resolution), but it will not display at 1080i.

 

My LG is DLP, not CRT and it supports both

Are you saying that my TV only natively supports one of those two resolutions and scales for the other?

 

Your DLP is a 720p display. Like I said, it will scale & deinterlace a 1080i signal, it will not display it.

A DLP-based display cannot pass-through an interlaced signal, it scans progressively.

 

Moral of the story, unless you have a 1080p TV, Blu-Ray is for the birds.

 

^ what about HD-DVD?

 

I have a Sony XBR Grand VVega (KDF-70XBR950). I am very sure I can view 480i, 480p, 720p and 1080i content. The majority of the time, I can tell the difference rather easy between 720p and 1080i.

Do you have any links to support this statement? If I am wrong, well, then I learned something new on AZ once again.