What is my TV doing?

[Dolby]

I've got a friend who bought an Xbox last week and he has a normal old CRT TV. He asked to bring it over last night to see it on 'high definition' TV - even though I told him it isn't (42" plasma 480 panel) and it's standard.

When he selected 720 or 1080i I thought it would be a black screen - but it displayed. 1080p didn't though. Does the TV resize the picture? Would I get the same picture whether the Xbox is set to 480 or 1080?

 

[doobiwan]

The Set is "HD Ready" which means it will support a Hi-def signal but will downscale the picture to 480p. It's a nice feature to have on a 480.

It's worth it to try out the different settings yourself, but personally I'd still set the xbox output to 480p - some games detect the difference and will use different size fonts on screen. Cod4 does if I'm not mistaken.

 

[Dolby]

Oh wow that's pretty cool .... didn't even know that So if a TV doesn't support HD or isn't HD ready, anything beyond 480 will yield a black picture - as happened with the 1080p?

 

[doobiwan]

That sounds about right. Typically an "HD Ready" set will support no higher than 1080i, I think it has something to do with the way in interprets the signal (makes it 540p the downscales to 480p) some won't even support 720p (
Like my telly - it's an HD Ready CRT)

 

[sludge]

Sorry for going a bit O/T... Doobi, wat tv do you have? I've only seen like one or two HD Ready crt tv's in the shops...