i got confused

[Ram Nagarajan]

Stefano: One of the reasons film DVDs look so much better on your computer monitor is that computers monitors have much higher resolutions than the average SD television set. You must have noticed, of course, that you can change the screen res of your monitor through your graphics card software up to really high resolutions (1280 x 1024 on my plain vanilla Samsung flatscreen). This ability to control the pitch of the scanning beam results in better looking images. Additionally, remember that most computer monitors are much smaller than the average TV set: You'll notice that the same image often looks sharper on a smaller 14" TV set than on a 29" set - unless you proportionately change your watching distance to compensate.
Add both things to the fact that software DVD decoders (as Rob L mentions in his posting) often de-interlace frames on the fly, and you get great images with DVDs on computer monitors.
Frank: The old BBC specs slip me right now; I'm sure I used to know them once upon a time :-) Let me see if I can find them again. (and please, call me Ram!)
Best,
Ram

[Ram Nagarajan]

Frank: Whoops, found it: The original John Logie Baird system (developed around 1926) used for the very first televison tests followed a 30 line system which the BBC adopted in 1931. (They did this despite better resolution being available by that year, as they could use their exisiting audio broadcast system for the extremely low bandwidth video.)
By 1936, the BBC shifted to a 405 line based system for the first high-resolution broadcasting (to the best of my knowledge, the 405 line system was also used for th Berlin Olympics broadcast in 1936, with those infamous TV images of Hitler opening the games.)
For a more detailed explanation, go to:

http://www.tvdawn.com/tvhist1.htm

Best,
Ram

[Stefano Sarfati Nahmad]

Rob,
you say interlaced minidv footage is better on a TV.
resolution is 625 lines in PAL and 525 lines in NTSC while computer monitors - as Ram noticed - can have a much higher resolution. I admit i don't know the resolution of my XL1s (and this is probably why i ask this question), if it's higher than TV, then i guess my footage is best viewd on a computer monitor ... or not?
good week-end everyone
stefano

[Rob Lohman]

A good TV will probably have the same resolution as your XL1,
but I'm not at home with "analog" resolutions/lines of resolutions
at all. And basically I don't care too much either. The problem
with interlaced footage is that it can look bad easily on a computer
due to the interlacing. That's why I'm suggesting to watch
interlaced footage on the TV.

Why am I not interested in resolution too much? Because I care
more of the end result in total. I always shoot in frame mode so
I don't have any interlacing issues at all.