1080i vs. 480p HDTV smackdown on Lord of the Rings {Engadget HD}

Feb 28th 2006 2:59PM The "smackdown" is highly misleading. Those captures look like they were taken from the NTSC Standard Edition. The PAL Extended Editions look much better, while admittedly still being inferior to the HD version.

Also, there's no production quality HD release either for Blu-ray or HD-DVD. The first batch of HD disc releases will most likely use MPEG-2. The broadcast captures from the article are H.264, i.e. superior to common MPEG-2 encodings.

Plus, no commercial TV set mere mortals could afford will be able to downscale in Photoshop quality. Unless people are willing to buy 4000+ Plasma/LCD sets running at 1920x1080 native resolution the actual reproduction will not look nearly as good as you indicated.