What is the difference between "720p", "1080i" and "1080p" HD formats?
When you're looking at televisions, some of your choices are going to be high definition 1080i or high definition 720p, or even in some cases high definition 1080p, so lets spend a second on that. 720p means 720 lines of resolution, p standing for progressive, and progressive delivering whets called a solid frame of information to the set; probably the most detail you can get in things that are moving very fast. 1080i is over a thousand lines of resolution, so that's better picture quality but it's interlaced the way, meaning that two fields of information or half of the frame is delivered at a time to the picture that you're viewing. With that, although it can give you better resolution, sometimes you can get a little bit of what we call artifacting or misinformation as the fields come together. It's not major, it's still a better picture than 720p, but it tends to be less effective sometimes when you're viewing something like sports or something with high motion. Then, probably the Holy Grail for these things is what we call 1080p, and that really doesn't exist in a consumer world yet. That's really just something that you're finding on very high end equipment. A 1080p television set at home may work well with computer games and graphics types of games, but nobody's delivering information for home viewing at a 1080p format as of this point.
