Do I need 1080p?

If i was in the market for say a 32″ LCD TV, is it worth going for 1080p rather than 768p?

It seems to me that if you have sky/freesat HD or blueray, then the content has a full 1080 lines, so it would be daft to buy a TV only capable of 768.

But, can anyone who has experience of such things tell me if I’d actually notice on a 32″ set, and if it’s worth the extra cash?

I’ve been told by a few people that you’ll only *really* notice the benefit of 1080 on a set bigger than 50″, but I’ve not tried it myself.

i’m not a fan of HD broadcast but it’d be silly to buy a 720p screen if you plan on viewing a HD broadcast source like Sky HD

That’s kind of what I thought, but I’d also be silly to spend the extra on 1080 lines if I couldn’t see them all….

SkyHD/Freesat is 720p/1080i (they are the same thing), it is not 1080p (“full”) HD.

You only need 1080p if you have a blu-ray player (or anything else capable of 1080p – PS3/xbox 360, etc). And you most definitely don’t need a 50″+ screen to “notice the benefit” of 1080p 🙂

Not sure you can get 1080p on a 32″ TV, only 720P or 1080i… I’d have to check that out though.

Mind you, it’s all redundant if you have crap eyesight…

but if you didnt but 1080 you would always wonder – “would that have been better if I bought the 1080p instead of the older version” Go 1080p I did and in my mind I know I have the best for a while to come.

However someone told me about HD e or something with 4000p! Arrggghh!

i confused myself there, i was trying to say what RT did but got confused half way through the sentance

doh

720p (1280 x 780 pixels at 25 frames a second) is not the same as 1080i (1920 x 1080 pixels at 50 fields a second).

At work we use a 50″ plasma to QC 1080 material whether it’s i or P as you can’t really asses the whole picture otherwise but you can notice the difference on smaller screens.

Don’t get me started on PsF which is how the bulk of our HD materials are supplied (Progressive material supplied at 50i…).

I dunno about all that 720/1080i/full 1080 HD malarky, but I saw some tellys in Waitrose t’other day. One was about a 37-40″ ‘full HD’ thing, and it was next to a ‘720/1080i’ 50″ thing, and I tell you, the smalller one was stunning, by comparison. Shraper, cleaner, brighter, more intense. Dunno if it was just the set up, but it looked bloody amazing (they were playing a Blu-Ray Star Wars film on all the screens).

My ‘little’ 24″ LCD monitor I use in the front room is the sharpest thing I’ve ever had. Pi55es over any telly I’ve ever owned, and seems to be as big as my last 26″ TV. Mind, it’s a computer monitor, so I don’t know if there’s any difference.

Today’s screens are truly fantastic. I can’t see how they can improve on them!

You don’t ‘need’ 1080p but if you can find a good quality TV with it for not much more cash then you might as well have it.

TBH I think the actual picture boils down to other factors and a well set up 32″ TV can playing back upscaled DVD’s can look better than a poorly setup one playing back the compressed sky HD channels.

I have a 32″ LCD LG set and it works really well with my XBOX 360. It actually accepts a 1080p signal but then uses some internal trickery to display it at 720p. It looks pretty good and normal DVDs playing back look way better than they used to on my old CRT and you can’t really tell much difference when a 720p avi file is played unless you are close to the screen.

Likewise my brother has a 50″ plasma and upscaled DVD’s look amazing on that when you are sat 10-12 ft away on the sofa, the colours are really vibrant.

What I dont understand are the people that buy all this super expensive hi-tech kit and then use it to watch poor quality pirate dvds/downloads! Totally pointless im my opinion.

Totally agree BEB, it’s all about quality content. However, if I’ve got the content, then I’d like to be able to see it all I guess, even if I do have to get really close!

I have a 1080p Dell 24″ monitor for my X360. I do not need it to be 1080p, but it is and it was only £180 spanky new.

yes

You can get a 32″ 1080p telly, just there’s not many of them about. Most are 37″ or bigger, but to my knowledge, Sharp, Panasonic and Sony all do one.

1080p Sharp in Richer Sounds is just over £500 iirc, and the picture quality was way better than any non 1080p tellys they had in there, when I popped in the other day.

question
do you need 1080p?
Is it the usual man thing the higher the number the better it must be??
i have a 1080p panasonic panel so i am guilty! and to be honest only notice a slight difference on blu-ray.
but its 1080p so it must be better??(right?)

I went through this deliberation and decided not to bother with 1080p for these reasons:

– I don’t currently have any HD sources and am not likely to in the near future because they’re not mainstream and are expensive, by the time they’re the norm I’ll be in the market for a new TV
– I was in the market for a 32″ and was advised that at the distance I was watching the TV from (10’+), the difference between HD ready and full-HD wouldn’t be apparent unless you were significantly closer

In the end I went for a 26″ which you can’t get 1080p on anyway.

Get a 1080p and a blu ray player (we got one thrown in for free when we bought a TV before Christmas)

wonderful; I’m rewatching my DVD’s at the moment because the bluray upscales the DVD

It’s more down to the ratio of screen size to viewing distance, and you’d have to be sat really close to a 32″ 1080p screen to notice the difference.

Add to that the only proper content available now in 1080p is blu-ray movies, so are you really going to spend the extra to get more vertical lines?

Personally, I’d stick the difference in the bank to be used on a new TV in 5 years or so by which time blu-ray movies will be at sensible prices and we might have decent HD provision across the broadcast channels.

As peeps are mentioning it depends on the quality of your input.

I wouldn’t get hung up on whether a screen is 1080p. I would check whether it displays a good contrast of colours, decent sound and how the black tones look.

I mean, you will see the difference when you watch a bluray/HD film on most new LCD’s now. It’s stunning.

Avoid the LG scarlet ones though. They are 1080p, 50,000:1 contrast, and have all the gubbins but the black areas are really murky and the sound quite tinny. Even calibrated the screen like my other TV’s but still poor so that’s going back to the shop.