1080i and 1080p the difference??
 

I've read the technical despcription of the differences between these resolutions,....but what IS the difference? What are they each best suited for? When would you notice a difference?

Is it that important when selecting a camera?

As usual, Wikipedia.org has the clearest explanation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1080i

Someday, when many of us are bald and wrinkled (say...10-15 years or more) Broadcast will be all progressive scan, and 1080 lines.
Almost all monitors over 40" are 1080p after Jan 1, 2005.
It's a 1080 world, and that's about all you need to worry about. 720p looks pretty good on most 1080 monitors, 1080i looks good on most 1080 monitors, and 1080p30 looks good on 1080 monitors. And when BD starts shipping, all that beautiful 1080p30 and 1080p60 will be stunningly nice as well.
Is it important? yes. Critical, to-die for, can't buy a cam without knowing your monitor? No.

http://www.vasst.com/search.aspx?text=1080 might help you.

I hope your right... except for the bald part in 10 to 15 years...

DSE, 10-15 years is an etrrnity in TV evolution (or should I say revolution). Ten years ago, broadcasters had not even been assigned the channels for DTV, and the DVD was only a year old.

I see exponential changes in the next five years or so.

My prediction - Flash memory will be THE medium for TV acquisition, and will replace hard drives in Laptops.

Spot,

I was just about link to that informative article when I noticed you'd already done it, thanks!

heath

I'd say it's currently more of a 720p world, with most affordable (small) HDTVs using that resolution and affordable HD cameras being closer to 720p than 1080p quality. Plus it's currently easier to distribute and play 720p than 1080p content, and even 720p is pushing it on the internet. But I'd agree that 1080p is where we're headed.

As for David's prediction about flash memory becoming ubiquitous for video and laptops, I'll believe that when it's on par with tape or hard drives in terms of cost/GB. Today it's at least a 100:1 cost ratio in favor of older technology: cut that in half every year and it will take 6-7 years for flash to become cost-effective.

CES Daily provided the numbers of sets manufactured and sold, and while the smaller sets are truly downsampling 1080i to 720p on the smaller sets, it is clearly a 1080 world, no dispute on the part of the manufacturers, sales research, resellers, and content providers. No 720p DVD delivery, no 720p gaming, no 720p media centers, etc.
Doesn't matter much in the endgame, but regardless of what opinions any of us have, the manufacturing and design side says it's a 1080 world in whatever flavor of 1080 it may be. In late 2005 and 2006, it's not comparable, as by a wide margin the consumer display sales are 1080. And few 1080 options were available pre June 2005.
Research Peddie, CES Daily, Amerisearch, as they're the ones providing the information I'm quoting. DVInfo.net might even be a Peddie subscriber, not sure.

5? years ago - 64M card $200
today - 4G card $110
in 5 years - 16G card $28

Assuming that trend is correct, in five years it would still cost ~$20/hour to record 25 Mbps video on flash memory, compared to $3-5/hour today on miniDV tape. If we say flash prices fall by a factor of four per year then it would take another year to get to $5/hour, or six years total. Sounds about right to me.

I just checked the Wal-Mart web site and it lists ~40 HDTVs ranging in price from $348-7688, of which I don't see any with native resolution of 1080p. Costco has a special deal this month on a 37" 1080p display for $1499, but that's the first I've heard of anything like that in that price range. As far as I can see anywhere I look, most HDTVs being sold right now are essentially 720p. Most HD video samples I've seen on the internet are 720p or less, and the best sub-$10K HD camcorder tests out at about 800 TV lines of resolution. Yes, we're headed for 1080p, but I don't see much evidence that we're getting there yet.

You're right. CES and all the research dev companies out there are wrong.

Up here (in Canada) most HDTVs I see say 1080i, 720p, etc. Very very few have I seen in the past year at stores that tout 720p only.

Just my observation.

But there's a huge difference between what a TV's native resolution is, and what type of signals it can display.

An HDTV with a tuner in it is required to display 1080 and 720; if it's ATSC-compatible it *has* to support all the ATSC modes; all 18 broadcast formats. So a 720p-native display (like the vast majority of LCDs sold so far) will also display a 1080 signal, but it'll have to scale the 1080 signal down to fit in its native resolution.

And then there are plasmas, which typically don't match either HD standard for pixels: there are plenty of 1024x768 and 1366xsomething plasmas out there. They'll take 1080i signals and display a picture.

The Marshall on-camera LCD high-def monitor has a pixel array of 800x480, but it will display a 1080i or a 720p signal. Obviously both will be scaled down to fit the Marshall's display.

So differentiate between what the native resolution of a set is, and what types of signals it can display, because those aren't the same thing.

I didn't say that, I'm just saying that the evidence hasn't shown up yet. If there's a flood of 1080p products about to show up in the pipeline that's good news, but it sounds to me like the researchers are looking ahead at least a couple of years or so.

If you'd read the reports I cited, you'll see that they are reports for current sales, past sales, and projected future sales. Remember, geographic economics are different.
Either way, no point in continuing to throw it back and forth. Suffice it to say that in my podunk little community of 10,000...we see it here. And we see it when we travel.

Fair enough: I'll look forward to seeing more 1080p displays becoming available soon where I live. If the Costco deal is a sign of things to come, that works for me.

On the computer side, things need to speed up a whole lot more. As has been said, 720p is pushing it nowadays but then we want to skip up to 1080i/p and make it as seamless as Mini-DV has become. Hard drives are the big one, Serial ATA is relieving a lot of it but it's still the slowest thing in computers these days. Processors, well, that's subjective. Some would say we need more speed and others say we need more optimization. Multicores are the way of the future, it reminds me of when PCWorld magazine had this cover that asked "Do we need anything more than 400mhz?". I can imagine that it will change to "Do we need anything more than 400 cores?". Yes, yes we do. But to the Average Joe this means nothing, but to us filmmakers and videographers, this is essential. They may worry about how their football game will show up on their new HDTV, but we'll be the ones on the sidelines recording that football show and dealing with the hassle of jumping a generation to 1080p and, quite possibly, 2K and/or 4K. Computers are one thing, but just regular HDTVs are another. As has been said, any HD-capable TV today can display all the formats currently in the HD standards lineup, regardless of the display's resolution. Clear fact.

The displays are another thing entirely, right now we're just getting the really good native 1080p displays on the market. For example, my parents bought a 75" Mitsubishi HD-capable TV back when HD was just starting to come out on the market in the late 90's, $10k without the HD-upgrade box. The TV can't "natively" display 1080p, just 1080i. It can do a workaround like other lower resolution TV's and still display the 1080p but it's not going to look as good as one of the 1080p HDTV's in your local Sony Style store. This would be an example of how far we've come in such a short amount of time, the displays are better, they're smaller, and cheaper.

Getting back onto computers, as far as flash goes, there's still a lot to be done before flash becomes the mainstream storage medium. I don't believe flash will ultimately end up being the standard, instead I believe we'll find another option, more than likely the holographic stuff they've been working on for years will yield an acceptable result. But until then, a better and faster connection than Serial ATA would do wonders.