[imcarthur]

Thanks for posting that article Scott. It was well-written.

People get hung up on the pixel count & forget that there are a lot of other factors that determine what you will actually see. Source & source material is the biggie, of course, but other hdwe issues exist. Since HD rollout has been going on for so many years, many consumers have spent & will spend big $s on displays or projectors that won't cut it in the long term. Gone are the days when your TV lasted 10 years or more.

One such factor which he discusses is scaling:

"Demand Side
Given the slow rollout of HD programming in this country, even the most ardent videophile would be challenged to envision the near term, mainstream dissemination of 1080p. Although higher resolutions can produce more detailed images, to achieve maximum benefit, the native 1080p hardware must be matched with 1080p content.

Scale away
The solution, then, for a considerable length of time, lies with scaling. For those buyers who dive into the 1080p pool, high quality scaling will be essential to bring lower resolution content up to the native resolution of the 1080p TV.

1080p scaling will take numerous forms:
Upsampling DVD players
A/V Receiver Integration
TV Integration
Dedicated, break-out box scalers"

And basically, the first 3 scaling options typically suck badly. And the last can be big $s. Not so long ago, we used a $100K Teranex scaler for a mega-system at a show. So the biggest change/difference as the pixel count stabilizes won't be in resolution, it will be in scaling.

When you are shopping, make sure you watch some Lo-Def material too. For the conceivable future, you will still be watching lots of it.

Ian