1080P - The P is for perfect!

After all the gobbledygook about my new TV in that last post, there may not be much of an audience for more HD-tech talk. But I'll dive in anyway.

All of those fancy plasma TV's, the super-duper SXRD DLP LCD LCoS projection screens? Yesterday's news.

Real videophiles these days are buying TV's that feature 1080p resolution. Television resolutions are expressed in terms of either "i' or "p." I stands for interlaced, which means the TV paints half of the lines on the screen in a split second, then turns around and colors in the other half. P is for progressive. That means the TV does the whole screen at once.

Your progressive scan DVD player, for instance, displays 480p. High definition TV on CBS, on the other hand, is in 1080i. High def over on Fox, on the other hand, comes through in 720p. All of those are better than regular TV, but none of them is as good as 1080p. Fans call it "full HD." At least theoretically, 1080p gives you one million more pixels than a regular HD TV.

So, say you go out and buy one of the latest TV sets: What can you watch in 1080p?

Ummm, nothing. Some aficionados say that computer displays look better on a 1080p TV, and others say they can tell the difference even on lesser content, but I can't.

However, the new Blu-ray DVD players -- coming out in a few more months from Samsung and Sony -- will display 1080p. So you've got that to look forward to (the competing HD DVD technology, called simply HD DVD, can also display 1080p, but I don't know what format the first releases will be in). One word of caution, though. Some TV's capable of displaying 1080p are not capable of accepting a 1080p input, like the Blu-Ray. Why? I have no idea.

And, BTW, my new TV? Not 1080p. It won't keep me awake at night, though.