Daily Blog – Brian Florian – March 5, 2008: PRODUCT DEMOS IN THE STORES CAN BE DECEIVING.

I was at a small specially store a few weeks back and came across something which really made me laugh.

There in the middle of the showroom were two identical “FullHD” 1080p TVs.  They were being fed Casino Royal from a single Blu-Ray Disc player, one of them getting 1080p via HDMI, the other 1080i via Component Video.

Now, if you’ve digested all that we’re written about how this stuff works, you’d know that if the TV being fed 1080i was doing “the right thing” when it comes to video processing, the two TVs should have had, for all intents and purposes, identical images.

They did not.

Even the most uninitiated to home theater could see that the second TV’s image, the one getting 1080i, was literally HALF the resolution of the one getting 1080p.  Clearly the second TV was not capable of doing even the simplest 2-3 inverse-telecine process.

With proper explanation of what was being witnessed, this demo should have at very least turned people off of the model in question.  Sadly, instead of pointing out how the TV in question was not capable of resolving the full 1080 line resolution available in that 1080i signal, the store was profiling the setup as a live demonstration of how “Component Video is inferior…” and how “1080i is not as good as 1080p…”

Wrong on both counts, at least in the context being put forth.

Much more telling, and indeed useful to the consumer, would have been to have the same TV paired with a model featuring at very least a functional 2-3 process (or better yet with motion-adaptive as well), both being fed the same 1080i stream.  Of course, faced with both displays getting the same signal to work with and one showing 2x the detail as the other, no one would even think of buying the inferior TV so we probably won’t see that in store any time soon.

Before the peanut gallery gets up in arms, one might say that as long as all you ever did was feed the thing 1080p, what does it matter that it cant properly processes 1080i into 1080p?  Indeed there are such situations, in particular where one is funneling everything though a dedicated processor (such as the excellent ABT or Gennum stuff).  In such cases the TV becomes much like a computer monitor: all it needs to do is map 1920×1080 at 1:1, have decent blacks, accurate color etc etc.

But when is the last time you heard a sales person or a manufacturer say “this particular TV is really only good as a monitor….you’ll need to spend another couple thousand on a video processor to get the most out of all your various sources…..” ?