I have a 720p tv. Do i get a better picture with my PS3 set on 720p or 1080i? ?

Question

My PS3 recognizes my tv as both 720p and 1080i.I know this may be a dumb question, but does anyone have a suggestion on which is better for watching blu ray disks? It is noticable when i play games and the setting is 1080i, but for some reason i think movies look better on this setting even though my tv is 720p.

Answer 1

You really want to keep the scaling to a minimum, the more you scale the image, the more "artifacts" can creep in.  It is normally always best to keep the Bluray player set to the TV's native resolution, which in your case is 720p.

If you choose 1080i in the player here's what happens.  Since the Bluray disc is encoded with 1080p, it has to scale the image down to 1080i before transmitting, then your TV scales the image again from 1080i to it's native 720p then upscales the image again to 1080i (it will not keep the 1080i image it recieves, otherwise it would be a 1080i HDTV.  So now you have the video signal scaled three times.

Now since the TV's native resolution is 720p, if you set the PS3/Bluray to 720p, then the player scales the image from 1080p down to 720p, it passes to the TV, where since it is already at 720p the TV will no longer need to do any further scaling of the image. So the image is only scaled one time.

In my experience TV's scalers are not the best in the world, I own a Pioneer Elite Pro720 HDTV with a built in $1,000 scaler, but years ago found my $70.00 DVD player actually did a better job of scaling the image then the Pioneer did.

It is always better to set the image signal to the TV's native resolution.

Answer 2

It all depends on whether your TV or the PS3 does a better job of deinterlacing and down converting the resolution. I find that from my PS3 to my projector that 1080i looks a little better than 720p even though it's a native 720p projector. It's pretty hard to tell though. You'll just have to eye ball it.

Answer 3

The closer you are to the TVs actual display resolution usually is the best result.

It could be better for standard DVDs as these are encoded in interlace 540i and 1080i requires slightly less processing and almost no overscan. Whereas your games are best in the progressive output of 720p.

So in your case the TV has a better deinterlacer, and the PS3 does a better job of overscan.

Answer 4

It really depends on the tv and its scaler. If you feed the tv a 1080i signal, it has to scale that display to 720p. It uses its own circuitry to do that.

If you feed the tv a 720p signal, the PS3 is doing the scaling to 720p. This must be a very good tv for its scaling to be better than the PS3. But it's not impossible.

Look closely at diagonal lines, that's where you will see any stair-stepping artifacts from bad scaling. The smoother they are, the better the scaling process.