What am I seeing?

L

LanPirate1

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 7, 2004
Messages
362
This may not be the right place to ask, but here goes. when I put a DVD in my rom drive, and watch a movie on my Dell 2007WFP, it looks great. Especially Cars, and SW Episode 3. Question is, what am I seeing? Am I seeing progressive scan, 720p, or 480p, or 1080i, or what?
My vid card is EVGA 7900GT, and of course I'm using DVI into the Dell. I'm using cyberlink Power DVD 6. Curious to know, thanks.
 
Hmm it's hard to actually translate those terms when you're viewing on a computer monitor.

First of all progressive scan - That's what the 'p' in 480p, 720p, etc stands for. Progressive scan is much better than interlaced video. Interlaced video (480i) is the plain old standard of broadcast video - aka the video on your 1980's era family TV set.

The first progressive scan TVs and DVD players did what we now call 480p. We used to just call it 'progressive scan' - at least when speaking about consumer level devices. Only with the advent of HDTV did the other resolutions come into play (720p, 1080i, 1080p, etc).

Now as for your question... it all depends on the size of your monitor, the resolution your playing the movie at, and the software used to play the DVD. Your standard DVD is 480p no matter what. But since the native resolution of your 2007WFP is 1680x1050 (typical for a 20" LCD widescreen panel) when playing a DVD movie at this resolution with your typical software DVD player, you are 'almost' at 1080p resolution. I say almost because 1080p resolution is 1920x1080. But in the end you are still viewing a 480p video upscaled to whatever resolution your monitor runs at. It can look quite a bit better though thanks to things like IVTC, image clarifying/sharpening, and other hardware based post processing that goes on in your video card or software DVD player.
 
Ok, I get it now. I knew about scanning lines and all that from the CRT days. Windows Media Center has a demo movie of people playing pool. It looks amazing. I'm assuming its as close to 1080p as I can get, if my native is 1680X1050. So I'm loosing roughly 300 lines horizontally.
 
So that's interesting: Even when viewing those 1080p videos, we're still not seeing HD on the 2007wfp.

What about the 2407wfp, which runs at 1920x1200? Are they actually downscaled?
 
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