Are more scan lines necessarily better?

Posted by Ergin Guney [IP: 206.181.95.130] on October 27, 1999 at 10:55:54
Using Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows NT):

In Reply to: Are more scan lines necessarily better? posted by Eylon Geva on October 26, 1999 at 18:09:54:

It all depends on the resolution of the source you are viewing. The "weakest link in the chain" principle applies. (Or the "slowest step in the process"... Pick your own metaphor!)

Let's say you are watching a DVD player with a horizontal resolution of 500 lines. If you watch this on a TV set with 400 lines of horizontal resolution, the picture you see will have a resolution limited to 400 lines (limited by the TV). You are losing the equivalent of 100 lines of horizontal resolution. In such a situation, you will notice an improvement if you upgrade to a TV with 500 lines or more of horizontal resolution.

But, in the same example, if you are already watching the DVD on a set with 500 or 600 lines of resolution, you will notice no improvement if you move up to a set with 800 lines of resolution. The picture you see will still have only 500 lines (limited by the DVD).

This implies that anything higher than the current highest resolution of any NTSC signal source (probably DVDs with 500 lines) should be meaningless. That only holds true until you start talking about a new format coming down the line, like HDTV that is downconverted to NTSC by a set-top box. If such set-top boxes downconvert the horiztontal resolution of the picture (from its original of up to 1920 pixels) not all the way down to 500 lines but, say, down to something like 800 lines of horizontal NTSC resolution, *then* you will need an NTSC set with 800 lines of horizontal resolution to display the full resolution of that picture.

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