I was having a debate over this and said 720p was better.

He said after deinterlacing @ 1080i then it would be 768p.

Is he correct? For reference etc lets talk about a 50inch samsung 720p plasma.

anyone?

You'll get varying responses to this because there's really not a hard and fast answer and there are a lot of other variables involved that affect picture quality (quality of signal, bitrates, quality of scaler/deinterlacer, quality of display, etc., etc.). BUT, assuming all other things being equal, give me 720p for sports or anything with a lot of motion and give me 1080i for everything else. I've long speculated that this is why the Disney family of channels (which include, notably, the ESPNs) and the Fox family of channels (which include, notably, the Fox Sports Networks) use 720p and pretty much everybody else uses 1080i.

My .02.

--Mav

What sucks about this is that many of us stuck with Motorola HD set top boxes must choose between 720p or 1080i. Yup, one or the other. There's no native like SA/Cisco, Pace, DirecTV, Dish Network, Tivo HD, etc..

I find myself watching more 1080i native channels, so I have my box set to 1080i. But sometimes I'll watch a lot of FOX or ABC, so I'll power off the box, go into the setup menu and change the output to 720p. I do notice a difference.

1080i looks better on 1080i channels, but 720p on 1080i channels look soft and watered down. The same goes the other way around.

Why can't Motorola get this right? You can't mean to tell me they haven't come across a user, employee, cable company, or internet thread/blog discussing this very same issue! It's a simple firmware modification that they need to push down to cable operators.

thanks.

I've always thought 720p is the better compromise. You can get 60 complete images per second with it vs 30 complete images per second with 1080 i. I have seen a complex analysis that suggests your friend might be correct in stating some vertical resolution is lost on a 1080i picture. Additionally, 720 lines is really a major improvement over SD where you actually get to see only about 480 lines so it looks to be high definition.

ESPN does 720p and it always looks good on my brother's 37 inch Sharp LCD handling motion fairly well. I'll vote for the motion of 720p over the improved resolution of 1080i.

In the real world of television transmission, the macrobloks that result from squeezing the data into the channel will determine the clarity of your image more so than either the transmission format or your set's native resolution.

--- CHAS