What's the difference between 1080i and 1080p resolutions?

Question

i've been wondering about this for a long time. so what's the difference and what does the "i" and "p" stand for anyway?

HD DVD and Blu ray - What's the point, they claim they have the highest definition, when only the highest HDTV can go up to 1080p. What's up with these HD companies?

Answer 1

The difference is that the i means interlaced, and the p means progressive. It's a long story that has to do with tv's 50 years ago being unable to do all of the lines from top to bottom, so they interlaced the lines. on a screen their might be 500 lines. so, the tv would first put lines 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, etc on the screen, followed by 2, 4, 6, 8, etc. So they called that interlacing. the progressive format is just that, progressive! the screen starts with line 1, then 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ect.

progressive is superior with out a doubt! the difference between HD DVD and Blu ray is that Blue ray discs hold more information. both can do 1080p resolution. BUT, blue ray has more dvd's with the highest resolution (1080p). 1080p resolution is 1920X1080. 720p resolution is 1280X720. if you don't have a tv over 50 inches, you probably won't be able to tell the difference.

basically it's two different companies that don't want to give into the other. blue ray is superior to HD DVD, but is more costly. another thing to keep in mind is that HD dvd's can be played by xbox 360. blue ray can be played by playstation 3. xbox is way more popular, so my bet is that that HD DVD will win out.

Answer 2

Have you seen a standard def big-screen TV?  There are very visible horizontal lines. This is because the images are drawn in  a "interlace" fashion.

Look at your computer monitor.  A lot smoother & sharper looking w/o horizontal lines.  This is because the image is drawn in a progressive fashion.

Right now - I think only a HD-DVD player or BluRay can output 1080p. So these are the first sources of 1080p quality signals.  Last year only a few models of HDTV would display 1080p natively, but this year lots of units do this.