First I guess you would start with a pixel. A pixel is the little square area that is lit up as different colors to make the overall picture. A LCD or Plasma TV is made up of a bunch of pixels aligned in vertical columns and horizontal rows.

High Definition video information stored as either 1280 columns x 720 rows or 1920 columns x 1080 rows. This is where the terms 720 and 1080 come from.

A lot of plasma and LCD televisions actually have 768 rows of pixels. So the TV has to take the signal with 720 lines and use that information to "guess" at what the picture should look like if it would have had 768 lines. It then displays this guess. This is called upscaling. If the TV gets a signal with 1080 rows of information it takes that and "guesses" what it would look like with 768 lines, and diplays that. This is called downconverting.

Sometimes a TV can downconvert better than it can upconvert because it has more information to begin with.

Other TVs end up downconverting the 1080 picture to 540 first, and then upconverting the 540 to 768. This usually results in a poorer picture than if you were to just upconvert the 720p signal.

I am not that familiar with your TV so I am not sure which setting will give you the best picture.

Hopefully I did't get you more confused then you already were

If you want check out this forum. It has a lot of great information on Home Theater stuff. I go by Beerstalker on there also.

AVS Forum

 

Thanks Beerstalker,
I have a fairly good understanding of video...or so I thought. The "native display" term threw me. I guess it's high time that I read the manual past the first couple of pages.

I'll look around the AVS forum again & educate myself some more.

 

I recently bought an LG GGC-H20L multi-format drive for my "home theater PC"; it reads Blu-ray and HD-DVD, and reads/writes to DVD and CD. Under $200. I built up the PC a year ago with an Athlon X2 3800 and Nvidia 8500 video card, which has hardware acceleration for the HD video formats. As it turned out, I had to get some additional software since the video card didn't support HDCP, and the bundled software was "limited". For audio, I can choose between PCM stereo, Dolby Digital, or DTS over S/PDIF (optical out) from the sound card, but I should be able to get lossless if I hook the analog outputs from the sound card to the receiver. Movies play back smoothly, and an ATI "Remote Wonder" works just fine with the BD and HD-DVD menus, and with VLC for downloaded HD content.

A better setup would be a video card that includes HDMI sound output; there's some ATI cards that do that (2400HD or something like that... saw one for just $70 the other day on sale). But that will have to wait until I get an HDMI receiver.