Question about watching movies in 1080p/720p

I'm not all too familiar with the high def resolutions stuff so i need some help here.
My laptop's native res is 1280x800, and i want to watch a movie or some shows in blu ray 1080p, how much of a noticeable difference would that be vs 720p if theres any difference at all?
Are there any restrictions to my resolution to watching HD movies?

 

The Blu-ray playback will be downscaled to 800p but even then, the picture quality is far better than DVD at 480p. As far as I know, all Blu-ray is 1080p or 1080i. There is no 720p Blu-ray.

 

Well you will be watching whatever format the video is in, and it will scale to your screen. 1080p will be scaled down to 1280x720 which is 720p.

 

Can you get 1080i on a 720p display , my TV does , can a notebook do it.

 

Yes absolutely. I have watched several discovery channels Blu-ray discs. All their movies are 1080i and they show perfectly with my notebook.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Technical_specifications

1280×720 is included in standard, however it doesn't mean anyone would use it in real life.

 

The distance to the screen makes a difference.

If you are hunched over your 15" laptop you can see a big difference between 1080p content on 1080p and 720p screens. Obviously with the 1080p screen you get all the detail, wheres the 720p screen doesnt look quite so sharp and full of fine detail.

However, if you are sitting back with your feet up and your eyes are a few feet from the screen, the difference is not so much. So it depends a lot on screen size, distance, eyesight etc.

 

If you watch a BR movie that was mastered in 1080p (as most are), and watch it on a 1280x720 screen, you won't see loss of detail. It's downscaled for that resolution. That's like taking a 10MP image and resizing it to 5MP, it looks great. It's when you go higher that it loses quality, just like zooming in on a 1MP image to fill your 1080p screen.

 

Of course you will. You will have a loss of detail, by definition.

Take a 1080p frame with lots of fine detail, facial pores, things in the background. Now scale it down to a 320x180 image D ) - can you still see all the facial detail, read the text on the screen?

Of course not. That is an exaggerated example (320x180), to illustrate the point. 1080p downscaled to 720p will still look good. But will it lose some detail? Yes.

(This is all assuming perfect viewing conditions of course.)

 

Hi, I think this question fits good here. When i watch this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XITHbsUUlYI movie on my 1920x1200 screen i get black lines from 60 pixels, but with other 1080p videos i get bigger black lines!? why is that?

 

I can't be certain, but my guess is that the other movies you watched were filmed in a wider format, so in addition to the letterbox (black bars at the top and bottom of the screen) that you get from playing 16:9 content on a 16:10 screen, you also have letterboxing in the video itself. Lots of directors, especially in movies, like to use ultra-wide screen formats. 16:10 is a 1.6 aspect ratio (and the likely ratio of your monitor), 16:9 is 1.777, another common one is 1.86, and there are others in use that go up and over 2. Basically, the higher the number, the more black bars you will see.

 

Yes, that's true. I posted a message regarding with this issue a while ago. It has a table with percentage of screen real estate wasted as black bars for each screen aspect ratio
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=4993390#post4993390

I posted the table here for convenience

 

Well, most movies and TV shows these days are mastered in 1080p anyhow right? They use some voodoo magic with the 2.39:1 theater film to have it match 1080p for a full 1920x1080 image?

 

No, you can't fit 2.39:1 movie into a 16:9(1.78:1) screen without having black bars. It's just not mathematically possible unless you don't mind to stretch or crop the image.

 

Actually hendra, lots of content (including all DVDs pretty much) are recorded in such a way that the film format (and thus the recorded aspect ratio) does not match the display aspect ratio. For instance, if memory serves, all DVDs are encoded at 720X480, which is a 1.5 aspect ratio, even though the display ratio could be anything from 1.33 to 2.68. Back in the analog days they used special lenses to distort the image to squeeze aspect ratios on to film, and with digital media, lots of stuff is actually encoded with rectangular rather than square pixels. There are a few reasons they do this, but the main one is that by utilizing rectangular pixels, they can get the full amount of visual data available in the format for whatever aspect ratio they want instead of losing all that encoding space to black bars.

 

Yeah so most blu-rays are running in 1920x800p?

@htwingnut: I don't think there is any channel broadcasting in 1080p right now (maybe in japan...). It's mostly 1080i stuff.