I want to make sure I can display HD pictures with my projector. I haven't seen any technical discussion of equating a monitor resolution to the ability to display in HD. Is there such a thing? If not, does anyone know what it will take? I was hoping to be able to use a 15 inch monitor with the 1028x768 resolution, 450:1 contrast, 16ms response. The Westinghouse LCM15v5 monitor fits this requirement.

Am I going to be able to display in HD with this monitor?

in a word: no.... but then again it depends on what you mean by "display in HD"...
720p HDTV is 1280x720 pixels, so you need a 17" lcd(1280x1024) to display it as true HD, 1080p requires 1920x1080 pixels and would require a WUXGA lcd(1920x1200) to display natively...
that having been said, depending on how you input the HD signal(say, into a scaler/converter) you could display HD on a 15" monitor, but not at full resolution(for example, 720p would be scaled to 576p(1024x576)

you might want to look at this thread on converters, scalers etc...
http://www.lumenlab.com/forums/index.php?s...c=15&st=800

"High definition" is only resolution. There's 3 that you'll want to worry about "480p," "720p," and "1080p."
480p = 720 x 480 (progressive) DVDs
720p = 1280 x 720 (progressive) HD-DVDs
1080p = 1920 x 1080 (progressive) BDs (Blueray Discs)
I'm not sure what source is 560p, maybe broadcast HDTV? This one might be important also...

Only consider "progressive" sources as viable for viewing on an LCD. The other option "interlaced" looks like crap. It's actually farily complicated, but "progressive" means every frame will be a "whole" frame, "interlaced" on the other hand means (in general) every 5th frame will be 2 frame "interlaced." Meaning all the odd pixel rows will be from one frame and all the even pixel rows will be from the other frame. It's very disctracting. The resolutions that are interlaced are:
480i (analog broadcast TV)
720i (some stupid broadcast HDTV)
1080i (other stupid useless broadcast HDTV)
Interlaced "support" on an LCD is OK, but an interlaced signal (say 1080i from an up-convert DVD player) should be avoided.
If your monitor has a resolution equal to or higher than the resolution of your source material then you should be OK, just so long as the monitor "scales" it correctly.

Scaling is kinda like zooming an image in a photo editor, the picture only gets bigger, not any better (actually, some of us would argue that it looks worse). There's at least 3 kinds of scaling: I think standard names for them are "1:1," "Fill," and "Aspect."
1:1 - is just like it sounds, every individual pixel of resolution from the source will display on an individual pixel of the monitor. The image is usually centered on the screen. The rest of the screen will be black. If the source resolution is much smaller than the LCD resolution the image will look small in comparison.
Fill - also does what the name implys: it fills the entire screen by streching the image in both directions independently. If the source and the the monitor have the same aspect ratio then this will look fine. But once you mix ratios (say a widescreen movie on a 4:3 screen) stuff starts to look weird. Faces get streched, shapes get skewed, etc. It's not pretty.
Unfortonately this is the only scaling most monitors do. You'll want to find a monitor that supports scaling using
Aspect - This will strech the image only until one set of edges of the source reaches the edges of the screen. This will leave black "letterbox" bars on the edges the image doesn't cover. This makes the source image as big as it can be without cutting anything off; faces look normal, shapes look as they should, etc. It's a pretty picture. This feature is commonly referred to as "HD ready." It means an HD source (say 720p from an HD-DVD player or Xbox360) will fill the screen while making everything look normal. All LCD monitors *should* have this feature, but I think only now is it becoming standard.


I hope this isn't overload... Long story sort: If the monitor has "Aspect" scaling it'll probably say "HD support" or "HD ready" all over it. Get a monitor with HD support.

P.S. Please don't start multiple thread on the same topic. It's confusing and generially bad forum etiquette...

Now that is just a matter of OPINION and shouldn't be stated as fact. 1080i on a 1920x1080 set will most likely look better than 720p will look on that same set . Of course some times it doesn't. Also sometimes the 720p looks better during fast motion scenes but sometimes it doesn't.

There's a lot of factors that determine which looks better. And sometimes it really is just a matter of what looks better to an individual.

True, it's definately an opinion that interlaced anything looks like crap. I had my monitor in 1080i mode this morning, and I couldn't even move the mouse around without noticing how bad it looked. Once there's movement; BOOM there they are, 2 fields mashed into 1 frame. I can notice them, very easily. I suppose some people can't, or they're watching movies with less movement, but unless an interlaced source is deinterlaced, it'll look very bad 20% of the time (usually 1 of 5 frames). Even deinterlacing has problems of it's own though.

I guess I could see a situation where a 1080i video with very little movement could look better than the same video at 720p, but I would have to say video that fits that category is fairly rare.

If anyone would like to check out a very good web page about interlacing go... HERE!

Keep in mind that most OTA broadcasts are done in 1080i (HDTV) and 480i (SDTV). Saying that these are crap and not to take them into account is much like saying "don't watch TV" !

The best way to handle 480i (IMHO) is to use a simple video input card (using s-video) and be sure it is able to be used with DScaler (v4) as it's de-interlacing is very good.


576p is a PAL format, may be important if you live outside the US, Canada and Japan.


just my 2 cents.
gs