How good is 1080i deinterlaced to 1080p?

I see no reason why scaler/deinterlacers with more pixel bandwidth won't be just as good at it as they currently are at 480i->480p. It'll probably take a small while for the tech to appear but I'd be shocked if Yves and co. weren't already working on it.

Since both my TV and progressive scan DVD player do a great job of the 480I 24FPS -> 480P 60 FPS conversion, I see no reason why 1080I cannot be converted to 1080P just as well.

The now defunct Toshiba LCOS set converted everything to 1080p, including 1080i. The deinterlacer in the Toshiba was excellent and it produced a beautiful 1080p picture. I don't know how much better a true 1080p feed would have been (the Tosh inputs wouldn't accept it anyhow).


Basically it boils down to the quality of the deinterlacer.

Well, remember that "film sourced" 1080i material can be "inverse telecined" into 1080p without any loss. It's only 24 fps material to begin with.


Video source 1080i will require an awfully good deinterlacer to make beautiful 1080p (think sports) and those are not trivial enough yet to be all that common.

Rogo, good point. So we could consider film sourced 1080i media to be "1080p-ready".


I was mostly thinking along the lines of the research on comparisons of 1080i to 720p and wondering how the comparison of 1080i (upconverted to 1080p) to 720p would pan out.

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There is a little bit of 1080p material- just look at some of the WM9 stuff. It's not enough to justify paying extra for 1080p right now, but it sure is nice to look at.

"So we could consider film sourced 1080i media to be "1080p-ready"."


Yes, as lone as the telecine has the capability to create the 1080i fields without losing data. Some telecine machines can do this, but so far, the stuff being broadcast generally doesn't have 1920 x 1080i resolution due to filtering and a whole bunch of other stuff Mr. Mason could explain far better than I.

The next generation of scaling IC's is definitely taking on true motion compensated de-interlacing for 1080i material.


Cheers!

DAve.