Why is HD 1080p? | Nostalgia Nerd

To be fair HD is 720P, FHD is 1080p, 4k is UHD and then we kinda gave up as 8k and 16k have no names that I've heard.

What I find the most fascinating is how many extra features engineers were able to cram into the analog standards. Adding in color signals, closed captions, secondary audio programs and programming data into the same bandwidth while still maintaining compatibility with older television receivers.

France had 819 line HD TV broadcasts from 1950 until the mid 80's.

The first Plasma TV I ever got apparently had a physical resolution of 1024x768, but it used rectangular pixels and gave the illusion of being a 720p display until you hooked up a computer to the VGA input. I looked at the physical pixels and checked, but it turned out the resolution it was feeding to the computer was absolutely right, the pixels were just physically rectangular and stretched a 4:3 ratio out to 16:9. The reason this worked at the time was because DVDs usually achieved widescreen by being anamorphic... that is, they actually delivered a "squished" 4:3 picture that, when spread out to 16:9, looked correct. So the TV was designed to accommodate this without a lot of horizontal scaling, by just having the same aspect ratio as the DVD while having a wider screen through the odd-shaped pixels. I will say, out of all the HDTVs I ever watched, I thought that one looked the best with 4:3 content stretched to fill the screen, and I never knew why for years. But once I knew how it worked, it was obvious... because it really is a native 4:3 display, they just managed to make it wider than it is tall. The ultimate test... which worked, was ripping a Blu-Ray and downscaling it to 1024x768, using the anamorphic setting usually intended for DVDs to see if it looked better on this TV. It did... looked better than anything coming in on the HDMI port, or anything from component video. It was kind of weird, because I realized the majority of people using that TV would never see the best picture it could produce, because everything was either too high a resolution and had to be scaled down using a bad scaler, or too low a resolution and had to be scaled up using a bad scaler. But if you feed it an anamorphic widescreen DVD, or better yet a customized 1024x768 signal over the VGA port that reproduces the anamorphic effect? It's perfect. In fact, I now wonder if some of the places that sold those TVs did just that, used a VGA port and a custom signal to show the TV at it's best, using content like that I created for it by hand...

So glad it only took 70 years to standardize displays, let's pray it doesn't take USB as long.

I'm old, so going from a B&W to a colour TV in 1976 was earth shattering to a kid.

If only Conan knew this: In the year 2000! In the year 2000! TV aspect ratios and resolutions will become more standardized

The only thing that kinda pisses me off, that 720p TVs are NEVER actually 1280x720. They are almost always actually 1366x768, simply because it was easier/cheaper for manufacturers to convert existing processes to make TVs, instead of making new ones.

That Sony TV would've made my brain explode in 1988. I didn't even have a colour TV till like 1985!

I always found it weird / interesting that 1080p was chosen when 720p was the faux-standard for HD for a lot of the early standard's definition.

2:16 - "would have their own stuff going on" - check the subtitles on that lol...

still remember the time where 1080 was new. all we could focus on were the objects around the subject, not the subject itself 😂

The best reference for this topic from the U.S. perspective is the book "Defining Vision" by Joel Brinkley. It documents the entire agonizing political (and sometimes technical) story behind the seemingly endless battle for high definition television in the U.S. There were around ten proposed resolutions from various organizations at various times for various reasons and the computer industry had little input. The first proposals were analog or hybrid digital/analog systems until one company developed a fully digital system that, while wasn't still good enough, was clearly superior to all of the other proposed systems.

Same reason as they now call everything that has nothing to do with AI, AI... Marketing..

FYI - Most broadcast 1080p is actually encoded at 1920 x 1088 - because of maths or something...

love your videos for years, cheers from switzwrland

Here's an interesting idea for a video. Why not look at the evolution of the picture standards in relation too colour & contrast. from rec.601, rec.709 to rec.2020 HDR. for instance why was the original colour gamut, gamma curves & 100nits of brightness decided upon? what was the point of the minor upgrades of rec.709? Why did it take so long for HDR to become a thing when LCD's have been exceeding aspects of the SDR specs since the 90's. And why did they decide on the rec.2020 colour gamut if it still can't handle all visible colours, officially it's so they don't require conversion chips to handle imaginary colours but seeing as all digital video requires computer chips anyway that explanation always baffled me.

1080p is still sweet spot.

Me: clicks video Video: loads in at 720p Me: ha.

I have just realised that I have watched this whole video without getting bored, that is no mean feat. I do look forward to these.