720p or 480p LCD TV?

[Rennn]

 

Regarding the panel resolution you're seeing - you may not even be able to drive the TV at that resolution; most TVs have a video processor that sits between the inputs and the panel, and takes whatever input (480i, 1080p, whatever) and makes it work for whatever the panel actually is. On higher quality sets this is usually pretty seamless, on cheaper sets it may not look perfect if you're asking it to scale a very low resolution source (like VHS) up to a very high resolution (like 1080p). It's safe to assume that outside of Blu-ray into a 1080p TV, a degree of conversion is necessarily going to take place; if you can't live with that, go to PC gaming - as long as the GPU(s) are up to it, you can render into whatever your monitor's native resolution is and map everything 1:1.

 

Thank you for the advice, but you're making the assumption that I'm not already into PC gaming. I have a medium-grade gaming PC (2GB GTX 660 GC, 8GB RAM, AMD Phenom II x4 at 3.2Ghz) and a 1080p LED monitor. Needless to say, I run all my PC games at the native res of 1920x1080.

I'm only looking for a low resolution screen specifically so that I don't have to subsample consoles any more than necessary. I don't mind if the image is downscaled, but I don't want it to be upscaled.

Edited February 3, 2014 by Rennn

[obobski]

 

 

Regarding the panel resolution you're seeing - you may not even be able to drive the TV at that resolution; most TVs have a video processor that sits between the inputs and the panel, and takes whatever input (480i, 1080p, whatever) and makes it work for whatever the panel actually is. On higher quality sets this is usually pretty seamless, on cheaper sets it may not look perfect if you're asking it to scale a very low resolution source (like VHS) up to a very high resolution (like 1080p). It's safe to assume that outside of Blu-ray into a 1080p TV, a degree of conversion is necessarily going to take place; if you can't live with that, go to PC gaming - as long as the GPU(s) are up to it, you can render into whatever your monitor's native resolution is and map everything 1:1.

 

Thank you for the advice, but you're making the assumption that I'm not already into PC gaming. I have a medium-grade gaming PC (2GB GTX 660 GC, 8GB RAM, AMD Phenom II x4 at 3.2Ghz) and a 1080p LED monitor. Needless to say, I run all my PC games at the native res of 1920x1080.

I'm only looking for a low resolution screen specifically so that I don't have to subsample consoles any more than necessary. I don't mind if the image is downscaled, but I don't want it to be upscaled.

 

 

True, I did make that assumption. :blush:

 

Anyways - you aren't going to accomplish precisely what you want with the PS3 - it will give you 720p as a result of whatever happens internally (and that's that). Since you seem almost allergic to resolutions higher than 720p, you should probably go with an SDTV. A small computer monitor will still be 1368x768 or 1600x900 (it would work fine, but you've stated this is not acceptable), and most 720p TVs will not give you 1280x720 natively. Your best bet there is to go with something used; I'd look for a Wega (as previously stated). KV-32FV16 (and smaller KV-27FV16 etc) is a good choice - has the 16:9 mode, will be under 720p, produces a sharp picture and good color (and can tweak its output), and is a big-ish screen. Will be glorious with the PS2; not so much with the PS3.

 

There's a big list of various models on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FD_Trinitron_WEGA

 

Note that all of the resolutions are interlaced. A lot of them don't have HDMI either.