PS3 downscales Blu-ray to 480p on 720p HDTVs Jan 04. 0719
Having just read through a really rather good interview over at Ars Technica I was astounded by following statement made by Ben Kuchera:
There is no real difference in quality based on what I’ve seen between HD DVD (Xbox 360) and Blu-ray (PS3). Keep in mind that unless your display can handle a 1080p or 1080i resolution the PS3 will downgrade the image into 480p.
What? That is some crazy shit. To quote one of the commenter’s on the article:
It blows my mind that Sony put the Blu-ray drive into the PS3 as a trojan horse that I’m forced to pay for, but it can’t even support my 720P (Sony!) HD television…
I’d be interested to hear from anyone out there with a PS3 as to what experience they have with playback of Blu-ray movies on a 720p HDTV.
Of course, the great thing about 1080i and 1080p is that 1080 they
both only go as far as 30 frames per second, which isn’t fast enough
for sport or video-games. (Or rather, there’s no specifcation for
anything faster than 1080x/30 yet). This is fine for cinematic
content, but for fast-moving content, it sucks.
Further, the Xbox 360 will down- and up-scale any content to
fit whatever format you tell it you’re outputting to. All games for
360 are required to support 720p/60, 480p, and 480i. If you’re
outputting to a 1080p set, though, the 360 will upscale the 720p and
drop the framerate. Conversely, if you’re watching 1080p content on a
720p screen, you’ll get downscaling to match your screen, not to match
the lowest common denominator.
The scaler they’ve used is right there in every 360, and should be
able to handle whatever content you throw at it… Well, for the
forseeable future, at least. It’s been mentioned somewhere that it
should be able to handle up to 1080p60, if not higher.
So much for Sony’s ‘true’ HD claims, eh?