Can HDA2/A3 'do' 24p with appropriate display

While I understand that the HDA2 and HDA3 do not natively support output of 24p signals, I'm intrigued. Given a high quality display can de-interlace the 1080i signal from these players and produce a 1080p image without loss, why can a high quality 1080/24p display not extract a 1080/24p image from the signal (maybe by discarding appropriate frames/fields from the signal)? Is that possible? I thought the underlying data on film-based content on an HD-DVD (or Blu-Ray for that matter) was 1080/24p so the information to do this would have been in the signal. If it's not possible can someone please provide or link to an explanation. I'd love to understand this better.

Thanks!

Thanks, that's what I thought (or at least was hoping!). So why all the fuss about 24p support/upgrades on the higher-end players? If a display supports 24p isn't that a sign that it's a high-end product which is likely to do a good job with the inverse telecine? Or do some displays pass 24p but offer no conversion to 24p?

Background to my question: I have an HDA2 and a Sanyo Z2 720/30p projector which I will upgrade to a 1080/24p capable projector in a year or so when prices come down a bit - so I am wondering if I will be obliged to upgrade the HDA2 at that time or whether it would be a fine source for 24p display. Or should I return the HDA2 and get one of the 20, 30, 35, XA2 models?

Interesting comments, thanks. This seems to be a common trap for the unwary - the difference between signals accepted and the native resolution/framerate of a display device. I've watched other threads get bogged down in discussion of whether stating that 1080i is accepted means the display can actually resolve at 1080 (my projector accepts 1080(i) but down-rez's to 720(p), for example). I have colleagues at work who assume that the advertised 1080i support of their old HDTVs implies they can (by definition) see 1920 horizontal res, for example.

The observation you're making here is that while a display may advertise 24p support it will convert such an input signal to its own chosen framerate - which might not be a multiple of 24, correct? I wonder if any device/vendor would do that? Obviously presenting a 24p image at say 30 or 60 fps seems to completely undo the value of providing the device with a 24p fps signal in the first place. I would certainly want to be sure that a device that claimed 1080/24p was capable of actually displaying using a multiple of 24 fps. Do any devices today advertise 24p but convert to a framerate that is not a multiple of 24? It would seem almost deceptive if they did?

Also, I wonder if we will see display devices support conversion of 1080/60i to 1080/24p or whether the assumption by display vendors is that the disc players will do the 'conversion'? This all seems unecessarily complex - all the data is on the disk - it should just be piped to the display in its native format which should display it the best it can (a naive perspective, perhaps!).

Does anyone know if any of the recent crop of 1080p LCD projectors support this kind of conversion? It will certainly be an interesting capability to watch for. I could well imagine this being a key selling point - it would improve their ability to sell the projector to the current crop of A2/A3 users, without requiring they upgrade to a 1080p capable player to get full benefit from their projector - effectively lowering the cost of entry.

Given the likely population of A2s, A3s it might make sense for a projector manufacturer to specifically target Toshiba HD-A2/3 compatibility in their testing.

SpeedDemon - please post the results of your experiment when you've tried it! Also love to hear from anyone else who gets this to work on their display. I think this is little understood capability - it would be good to get more people asking for this!