To 1080p or not to 1080p…

That is the question that many of you are asking. The new high resolution 1080p TVs are starting to colonize the big box stores. And their alluring appellations of True HD and Full HD are like siren songs to the early adopters and videophiles among you.

For the truly hard core, the question was never if but when. The time for those avaricious aficionados is yesterday. For the less hot-blooded among us, the advice may be, "patience, grasshopper."

Sharp 52" 1080p LCD, LC-52D62U

To help crack this conundrum, let's set this purchasing poser into its historical context. (Please note, you can mouse over the single underlined terms for more detailed information.) Back in the technological dark ages of the late 20th Century, NTSC television signals were broadcast in a resolution now called 480i. (In the U.S. – the rest of the world had adopted differing standards.)

"480" signifies the number of horizontal lines that make up a single frame of video. The "i" stands for "interlaced," which is a system that delivers a frame of video in two fields. Interlacing was adopted back in the 1950s to overcome limited transmission bandwidth. (If you can remember that far back, all TV was broadcast over antennas.)

Interlacing has never been a great solution because it does not offer the best image quality. In a movie theater, film is presented one full frame at a time, which is called progressive, or simply p.

Until high definition came on the scene, 480i, (now often labeled standard definition or SD), was the way that every TV set in the U.S. worked. We lived with these NTSC standards for almost fifty years. As technology and marketing marched on, researchers, manufacturers and broadcasters took a two-pronged approach to producing a better quality video image.

First, they increased the resolution of the video signal and the TVs receiving them. Though there are many different choices in the ATSC standard, the two common resolutions are called 720 and 1080. Again, resolution is denoted by the horizontal lines in a frame. Instead of the old 480, these new standards produce 720 or 1080 horizontal lines. (Actually, resolution is measured in both directions, vertically and horizontally. So, you may see them listed as 1280 x 720 and 1920 x 1080. If you do the math, these are both 16 x 9 formats.)

The simple formula is more lines of resolution = a higher quality (or we can call it a higher definition) image. Of course, nothing is simple in these HD days. The second factor in improving image quality is shifting the signal to a progressive format. Broadcasters have split on the idea of transmitting video progressively. Those who do, use the 720p format. Those who don't, opt for 1080i. (You can see who is who in our HD programming guide, HD Prime.) Video guru, Joe Kane, among many others, believes that progressive can out trump video resolution to the extent they prefer 720p over 1080i.

Of course, in the last year, manufacturers are beginning to grace us with 1080p HDTVs. Which brings us back to the original question. If you have been following along with our HD calculus, the answer seems pretty obvious: p is better than i, 1080 is higher than 720. No brainer, give me the 1080p.

Well, here's the rub. No broadcasters are transmitting 1080p content. And they don't plan to anytime soon. If you mostly watch network television, and that includes ESPN HD and the premium channels like HBO HD, the best you will receive is 720p or 1080i.

Now, if your tastes run to high definition DVDs, then you will have better luck finding 1080p material in the very near future. But don't expect to see a lot of classic movies reissued in 1080p until the HD-DVD / Blu-ray format war is settled or a cross platform player comes out.

If you have decided on shopping for a new HDTV, you should be aware of one last term, native resolution. Almost every new HDTV will advertise that it handles 1080p, but that does not mean that its native resolution is 1080p. A 720p monitor can display 1080p sources. They just have to downscale the image.

Though if you think about it, content is available in a range of formats, 480i, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p. Your HDTV has to handle all of them through technical tricks of upscaling or downscaling and interlacing or deinterlacing. (Not to mention how well it translates native 24 frames per second films to 30 frames per second video.)

The theory of course is that a 1080p native resolution TV will handle 1080p sources more cleanly than other lower native resolution TVs. But if the TVs are doing their job well, most non-hypercritical viewers will not be able to tell the difference between a 720p and a 1080p TV when watching 1080p programs.

And the test may be how well does a 1080p TV handle the more common, lower resolution materials. Our job as reviewers at HDTV Solutions is to answer that question.

One more consideration, 1080p is the current leading edge technology. If you are are buying an HDTV in the next few months, then supposedly purchasing a 1080p TV should future proof you. But when I was at CEDIA, I asked a number of sales reps if we were at a resting point with 1080p. Most just looked at me in puzzlement. Technology is on a roll, which feeds marketing's insatiable appetite for new products. Expect your state of the art 1080p HDTV to be old news by 2008. True HD will be replaced by Too Good to Be True HD and Full HD will morph into Belt Popping Ultra HD.

Finally, if money is your deciding factor, you know that the price for 1080p's will drop over the next six months. But the market is mature enough and highly competitive, so you probably will find some irresistible deals this holiday season.

It's a tough choice, but we'll be here to keep you informed.

Stay tuned,