Project Offset: An Epic Fantasy FPS for PS3? Xbox 360? PC?

Some impressions:
http://news.designtechnica.com/talkback38.html
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Recently I stood in a room full new digital TVs from a major manufacturer and watched as a 42-inch set listing for $6999 was far outperformed by a 46-inch set selling for $1499. That was no surprise to me, but it may be to some of you.
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So what’s the big secret that I’ve waited till the third paragraph to disclose? You’ve probably guessed already. The $6999 product was a flat-panel plasma display (42HDX61), while the $1499 product was a rear-projection set using a conventional three-tube light engine (46F510). The people at Hitachi are assuming that people will pay more than twice as much for a picture that isn’t quite as big or as good because the form factor of flat panels is just so much cooler. And of course they’re right.
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Wait, there’s more. Though both sets were HD-worthy, the cheaper one also had greater sharpness and detail. Its native resolution was 1080 by 1920—better known as the 1080i HDTV format—while the more costly one had a pixel grid of 1024 by 1024. True, the 1080 by 1920 pixel set could only display about 90 percent of the 1080i format’s potential resolution due to the limits of the seven-inch tubes (it takes nine-inch tubes to do 1080i perfectly). Moreover, the vertical resolution of the plasma was within spitting distance of the 1080i standard (1024 vs. 1080) though its horizontal resolution fell far short of the format’s potential (1024 vs. 1920). In any case, the tube-based projector had a fine-grained quality that stood up to close inspection—with seven-inch tubes, the scan lines slur together nicely—whereas I had to stand at least four or five feet from the plasma before the pixels blended.

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this TV rocks, it's 90% of 1080x1920 and regardless... specs are one thing, and your own two eyes are another. The picture on these is amazing, definately one of the best in the showroom for any price. HD looks stunning.

My point was the higher you get with resolutions the smaller the visual difference becomes, as long as you're getting a 720p or 1080i signal you're good, it's gonna look amazing, beyond that you're really just splitting hairs IMO.
 
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I'm pretty sure that guy doesn't know what he is talking about. Last I knew the Sony Superfine CRTs have the best resolution and they still barley top 1400 horizontal rows. Also, $7k for a 42" 1024x1024 plasma is insane even over a year ago when the article same out, and now you can get a 50" 1366x768 plasma for less than half that.

Also, I don't understand the stink about 1080p, do most HDTVs really not support it? I know my little 852x480 plasma takes a 1080p60 signal from my PC just fine, I'd figure that at least the LCDs and DLPs that acutally display 1920x1080 would do the same.
 
kyleb said:
I'm pretty sure that guy doesn't know what he is talking about. Last I knew the Sony Superfine CRTs have the best resolution and they still barley top 1400 horizontal rows. Also, $7k for a 42" 1024x1024 plasma is insane even over a year ago when the article same out, and now you can get a 50" 1366x768 plasma for less than half that.

Also, I don't understand the stink about 1080p, do most HDTVs really not support it? I know my little 852x480 plasma takes a 1080p60 signal from my PC just fine, I'd figure that at least the LCDs and DLPs that acutally display 1920x1080 would do the same.

We've been through this so many times, and every time you come up with the same argument that your EDTV plasma can "take" a 1080p signal just fine...

Your EDTV plasma will "take it" but it won't "display it". It will scale down to the native resolution of your set, which is 480p, and give you lots of free AA in the process. You will however lose lots of information (pixels).

There really are very few sets capable of displaying 1080p. Most only do 720p. SO in the end it's more efficient to stick to 720p for the time being.

And in the end we'll need 1080p sets to even display proper 1080i signals cause 720p sets are limited to 1280x720 (or 1360x728 or whatever it is) which is about 1 million pixels. 1080i is 1920x1080 (interlaced) so until we get sets capable of full 1080p (which is 1920x1080 progressive), we wont even get proper 1080i which has about 2 million pixels - though it's interlaced.

It's the horizontal resolution that's the problem u see, from 1300 for 720p to 1920 for 1080i/p.
So in the end, even 1080i on most 720p sets (most plasmas and LCDs) is losing half of its pixels.I'm not sure that counts for CRTs, but it's certainly true for plasmas and LCDs.

These sets will "take" all the signals up to 1080p, but one thing is taking them, another is actually displaying them properly.
I'll wait till 1080p sets are affordable, it just feels like the right thing to do.
 
london-boy said:
We've been through this so many times, and every time you come up with the same argument that your EDTV plasma can "take" a 1080p signal just fine...

Your EDTV plasma will "take it" but it won't "display it". It will scale down to the native resolution of your set, which is 480p, and give you lots of free AA in the process. You will however lose lots of information (pixels).
Yet I have always understood this an never made any claims to the contrary, so what the world do you keep going on about this for? You certainly didn't do anything to respond to my question. I understand completely if you don't know the answer to the question; I don't know the answer either, that is why I asked. However, there is no point in going on about the difference between native resolution and input resolution as it has nothing to do with the question at hand.
 
The answer to your question is there's no TV's that display a native 1080p, even the sets that 'accept' 1080p signals use 1080i and de-interlace it to make 1080p.

I've yet to see a single TV set on the market that had true 1080p input, they just don't exist yet....
 
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Again, TVs that support a true 1080p input do exist, I know for a fact as I am typing this on one right now. I can post a picture of the display manager open with the settings 1920x1080@60hz applied if that will help bring this issue to a close.
 
Sorry, I but I had to get that above bit out first, now I'm crurious as what you mean by this:

scooby_dooby said:
even the sets that 'accept' 1080p signals use 1080i and de-interlace it to make 1080p.

It looks you saying the TVs accept the 1080p signal and the interlaces it down to 1080i only to deinterlace that and bring it back to 1080p. Did I just missunderstand what you were trying to explain or what crazy reason would there be for doing all that extra work?
 
kyleb said:
Sorry, I but I had to get that above bit out first, now I'm crurious as what you mean by this:



It looks you saying the TVs accept the 1080p signal and the interlaces it down to 1080i only to deinterlace that and bring it back to 1080p. Did I just missunderstand what you were trying to explain or what crazy reason would there be for doing all that extra work?

I believe what scooby is saying is that the TV accepts 1080p (doesn't output it) just takes the signal..THEN deinterlaces it...so you get a 1080p picture...but still not as good as displaying 1080p nativley.
 
But if an TV is progressive scan and has 1920 pixels across by 1080 tall(such as that Sharp I considered buying), and If that TV supports 1080p input (such as even my little ED display does), how in the world is that anything but "displaying 1080p nativley"?
 
scooby_dooby said:
The answer to your question is there's no TV's that display a native 1080p, even the sets that 'accept' 1080p signals use 1080i and de-interlace it to make 1080p.

I've yet to see a single TV set on the market that had true 1080p input, they just don't exist yet....

I thought the whole problem was the sets themselves don't accept 1080p yet. I believe it is a limitation of the HDMI/DVI circuitry in use. (Silicon Image now produces HDMI receivers capable of 1080p). If it can accept 1080p, it'd be incredibly stupid to convert it to 1080i and then to 1080p. The sets take a 1080i signal, use whatever flags, and create a 1080p image from it.

That is how the Samsungs work, as far as I understand. Maybe there are others (i.e. Qualia) that work differently.

And yes, the TVs ARE 1080p native, even if they don't accept the signal. Everything going into it will be converted to 1080p, so thats its native res...
 
man this stuff is confusing, i'm just going by what I understand the situation to be right now.

Some TV's will accept 1080p signals, i.e. if you hook it up to a source outputting 1080p the TV can display it. However they aren't actually capable of taking the 1080p picture and displaying it as a true 1080p signal, instead they recieve it as a 1080i signal, de-interlace it, and display as 1080p.

So, the situation today is there are NO true 1080p TV's, they just don't exist.

By no means am I an expert so anyone can feel free to jump in, but I have read up quite a bit on it and that's what I understand the current situation to be.

edit: actually i think you are right. the problem is there are no TV's that actually accept 1080p, this is basically the ultrapimp TV, $50,000 MSRP, native 1080p, but it only accepts 720p and 1080i. It must deinterlace, or upscale everything to 1080p.
http://ca.lge.com/en/prodmodeldetail.do?actType=search&page=1&modelCategoryId=0102&categoryId=0102&parentId=01&modelCodeDisplay=MW-71PY10&model=Select+a+model
 
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scooby_dooby said:
Some TV's will accept 1080p signals, i.e. if you hook it up to a source outputting 1080p the TV can display it. However they aren't actually capable of taking the 1080p picture and displaying it as a true 1080p signal, instead they recieve it as a 1080i signal, de-interlace it, and display as 1080p.

Again, I don't follow your logic here. If a progressive scan TV accepts a 1080p, where does the 1080i and deinterlaceing come in? The TV would have to interlace the 1080p and then deinterlace it again for that to happen, and that doesn't rightly make any sense.

As for HDMI and DVI receivers not being cappable of 1080p, I don't see how that would be consdering we have monitors like the Dell 2004fpw that do 1920x1200 over DVI.
 
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