Freeview satellite on 720p or 1080p Plasma

[wodger]

I only use freeview over Satellite, which I believe is just SD quality. I never rent DVDs or bluerays. I'm thinking about getting a new 42" plasma TV, and that 720p is going to be good enough for me for now. Question is will my 'rig' handle this nicely? Does my graphics card do the upscaling to 720p easily, or will the TV be forced to do it? Is that even possible? Appreciate any comments. Cheers.

[wodger]

So I took my PC to Harvey Norman and connected it to the TV over component inputs. It worked straight away, so that was good. The TV reported it was running at 1080i. There were clearly a few things to tweak in terms of colour etc but it was pretty good considering I was just looking at SD recordings of NZ satellite freeview.

What I don't get it how my existing 4:3 TV is 1024 x 768 (or it fits that) yet this much wider TV (42") has the same resolution of 1024 x 768 as its native resolution. The picture was obviously stretched. Using "Fill" in gbpvr helped alot - very watchable.

Is this normal? Why do they have 768 rows of pixels yet supposedly 720 lines of definition. What does it all mean? :confused:

[psycik]

its a plasma trick I think. My LCD is like a big monitor, and runs at 1920x1080.

I think some plasmas (the non Full HD ones) have rectangular pixels not square. This is how it does it.

[nitrogen_widget]

I noticed this also when looking at the $550 50 inch plasma's.
Some are 1024x768 & some are full 720p.

[wodger]

So what is happening to the remaining 48 rows?! :confused: