This is going to be bad news for Sony, because there are a lot (millions) of displays out there based on limited electronics that prevent them from being able to accept 720P or 1080P. I have a five year old rear-projection television that listed for $5500 during its day, and it was limited to 1080i and 480P.
The limitation is usually in the area of video bandwidth in the electronics. For video bandwidth consideration, 1080i consumes about the same amount of video bandwidth as 540P, but both 540P and 1080i consume a lot less than 720P. And its not the 1920 vs 1280 aspect, either. Some call this scanrate instead of bandwidth.
For Sony not to be able to handle this issue in a firmware patch is puzzling. First generation tandalone Blu-ray players use a broadcom chip that was only capable of 1080i output and not 1080P. In fact, Blu-ray player manufacturers had to employ another processing chip to deinterlace the 1080i video.
Initially, I would have thought that all video processing would be done in software mode. This minimizes costs by not buying the broadcom chip, but this would lend itself to being able to provide 1080i. Introducing interlacing is not process-intensive (deinterlacing an interlaced video stream is process-intensive).
Anyone betting that this is more of a licensing issue?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
GhostDoggy @ Nov 26th 2006 8:11AM
This is going to be bad news for Sony, because there are a lot (millions) of displays out there based on limited electronics that prevent them from being able to accept 720P or 1080P. I have a five year old rear-projection television that listed for $5500 during its day, and it was limited to 1080i and 480P.
The limitation is usually in the area of video bandwidth in the electronics. For video bandwidth consideration, 1080i consumes about the same amount of video bandwidth as 540P, but both 540P and 1080i consume a lot less than 720P. And its not the 1920 vs 1280 aspect, either. Some call this scanrate instead of bandwidth.
For Sony not to be able to handle this issue in a firmware patch is puzzling. First generation tandalone Blu-ray players use a broadcom chip that was only capable of 1080i output and not 1080P. In fact, Blu-ray player manufacturers had to employ another processing chip to deinterlace the 1080i video.
Initially, I would have thought that all video processing would be done in software mode. This minimizes costs by not buying the broadcom chip, but this would lend itself to being able to provide 1080i. Introducing interlacing is not process-intensive (deinterlacing an interlaced video stream is process-intensive).
Anyone betting that this is more of a licensing issue?