Gadget Myths—Exposed!

While projecting a 16:9 at 104 inches diagonal you can see the difference between 1080 and 720 and it is dramatic. However the hardware you have to connect to the 1080p projector would need to be top notch, costing $$$. Only the 2-4 core processors paired with newer graphics (shader2.0 256+) cards are taking on 1080 material without hang-ups (MKV or BluRay Formats). Projecting at 720 allows for less expensive hardware. Spend the extra cash on better color saturation and contrast levels for your TV.

Actually most of these are ironically myth myths.

I'll go through each one.

1.1080p is only not useful if you have a small TV and you are sitting far away, because then you won't be able to notice the difference. If you have a big TV and/or you sit really close to your TV, 1080p will give you a sharper picture than 720p.

2. Yes there are many other factors that affect picture quality other than megapixels but since we are discussing megapixels let's not delve into other topics. Megapixels are just a measure of the resolution of the image. As for just printing out small pictures a high megapixel count is useless. However we have computers and the web, and higher resolution is useful for two things. Reason 1 is if you have a large screen it will make the picture sharper. The other reason is for zooming. Theoretically with a high enough pixel count you could actually zoom into a persons skin and see their cells. That is the extreme but lets say you take a picture of a a mountain from far away, with enough zoom you can zoom in and see a squirrel from thousands of feet away. And then you can capture that zoomed image and print out a picture of it. That is why more megapixels is always better.

3. This one can be overkill, however surround sound is always better than just hearing the sound coming from one direction, even if all 5/7 speakers use the same output all the time. With movies and games it is very important because it lets you know where the sound is supposed to be coming from.

4.Yea this one is bullshit because computers are designed to last for decades and we upgrade every 2-5 years anyways.

5.Right now ssd drives are not worth the money because the only advantage they give is that they are smaller. However in the future the biggest advantage will be for speed. Right now hard drive speed is a major bottleneck, it is much slower than the CPU and memory. When price goes down and speed goes up they will replace hard drives.

Im dont need to be audiophile to enjoy surround-sound music (in any format - sacd, dvd-a, dts-cd, dvd, quadro). In case of "true" approach - natural multichannel recording or 5.1 tasteful remixing such music goes far away from stereo... Without any gimmics and stupid effects, which are rare in reality. The key is records - not upmixing standart stereo cds to "5.1".

As a salesman and a tech junkie, I always get really irked whenever a customer demands to know the contrast ratio of every HDTV in the store. The human eye can detect about a 750:1 contrast ratio; not 8,000 or 15,000 or even 1,000,000 (such as the new Samsung plasmas). The TV makers, however, know that large numbers sell.

With a large number of megapixels on a small image sensor, noise is dramatically increased. So yes, you might be able get a photo of a squirrel on a distant mountain, but it will look horrible. There's no point in having more pixels if you photo looks nasty. Image quality counts.

No one has yet commented on the most hyped-up part of the 1080p mumbo-jumbo. The "P" part. It stands for progressive, and differentiates the way the scan lines are traced. I.e. in progressive, all 1080 lines are traced in order, 1-2-3-etc. In a normal TV (every single one ever made before the advent of the 1080p crap) traces lines 1-3-5-7, and then goes back to 2-4-6-8, etc. It's called interlaced. This was invented mostly for computer monitors, so that people staring at the screen for 8 hours a day wouldn't get a headache from the very subliminal yet perceptable flickering that you get with interlaced scanning. This is awesome for computers, but seriously, how many people sit 18" from their TV for 8 hours a day? If you've got that much time on your hands, and are that lazy, you probably can't afford a 1080p TV anyway.

I find it amusing that people will pay more for a 1080p TV than a 1080i TV and none of them know what it even means...

Yay hype!

And actually, to comment on someone else's statement that surround is always better than direct sound...

Not true. The human brain focuses and images to sounds just the same way we do it to visual cues. You just don't pay attention to it as much.

So imagine having to watch a movie inside a bubble... with 360 degrees of viewing surface. It would confuse and irritate you.

Listening to music in surround for long enough will almost imperceptibly confuse your brain, eat up your 'cpu', give you a headache, and generally rub your brain the wrong way.

Go Popsci! Awesome article.

#1. 1080p is not a must but if I decide I want to connect my computer to the 52" screen I would like to be able to run it at at least 1280x960 or even up to 1920 x 1080. I see it more as an investment so you should be able to stay up to any standards for another 20 years. It is not a must, but there is usually a very minimal difference in price between 1080i and 1080p.

#2. Megapixels is a good start, but always make sure it is true megapixels and NOT interpolated (CPU making a educated guess on how to make the picture larger). I go by use then by megapixels. AKA If it is for everyday snap and shoot, a camera with 8 MP and a 3X optical is fine. I have found on MORE than one occasion that my older 5 MP Kodak with 12X optical and an optional 2.5x lens attachment can get me a better picture than everybody else 10 or 12 MP 3x cameras. They lose their megapixels very fast when they hit the digital zoom. When they go to 2x digital zoom they just lost HALF of their MP so now their 8 MP is only 4 MP and if they go up to 4x digital zoom, they are around 2 MP. I still have my full 5 megapixels the whole way.

#3. Anything over 5.1 is overkill. Most audio is still not recorded into anything more, and alot of the time it is not even recorded in that. I have a Bose 3-2-1 system that many other people look at and can not believe the kind of sound I get out of it. I am a little more picky on where I put my speakers. Most average people are not. So for a lot of people they are wasting their time and money on all the extra speakers, especially if they dp not get them placed for optimum hearing experience.

#4. I can understand this being a possiblity back in the early 80s. but not these days. Besides I find it actually better to give many of the components a rest. Some people I believe see turning the computer on and off like stop and go traffic for your car. More regular component usage on your brakes, and all the parts related to that. A car that has a greater percentage of highway use is seen as been run a pretty constant setting for longer intervals so their is actually less use on the other systems of the car.

#5. SSD drives are not the miracle yet they could be, but I also do like the idea of having my OS loaded onto a 8 or 16 GB drive so that it loads up in a fraction of the time a normal drive loads. I wish there was more drives with a hybrid normal drive with a SSD buffer like an L2 cache for CPUs so that way a drive can spin up and send the data to the high speed memory first and you might only need a 8 or 16MB buffer for the larger drives since it should be able to keep bringing in information and writing it to the SSD part at a much higher rate on average. I think SSDs might start to give USB flash drives a run soon if they make small easily swappable SSD drives available to the public. Even if it looked like a zip disk or a 3.5 floppy with much high capacity. The access speed would be great. It will still be (rough estimate) of 4-6 years before SSD can catch up in size and come down in price enough for most everyday consumers. I say this mainly since hard drives with the newer perpendicular writing method have just started hitting the market in the past 2 years and can still increase in size easily another 2-4 fold. Aproximately to the 4-5 TB range. These days people want so much space they always want a larger drive. So unless something comes along with an ability to writing large amounts of storage data for reasonable prices Hard disks are here for at least another 2-4 years.

Hard disk drives weren't spectacular when they came out - it took something like 15 years just to rev up the rpm's. SSD's are an emerging technology, give them time to get bigger and cheaper; and when they are cheap enough you will probably have multiples of them in your computer for different purposes; when the computer manufacturers start selling them as standard in new computers, they will be in the right places set up in the right way to give a massive speed boost to your computer.

1080 is a must if you ever plan on using it as a computer screen. The 'P' is useful if developers ever start using "shutter bug" technology to make 3D content for the home. i just wouldn't cut it p will do it but the P-120hz now that would be an awesome display for a true 3D ps3 game.

As a reply to asskiicker, as a semi-pro photographer, I have to say that your comment regarding megapixels is still misleading. An underexposed, blurry, or just plain bad exposure isn't made better by megapixels. The author of the article made a good point with his composition regarding a camera's image sensor size and type, compression, lenses, image stabilization / vibration reduction, and who is taking the picture. I certainly have seen a great many pretty pictures, with bad color correction - blurs and horrible depth of field as taken from a crappy $400 10 MP handheld, as opposed to beautiful compositions sloppily crafted from a $300 old 6 MP DSLR with some thought applied in crafting the exposure. While you placed the emphasis on megapixels - I think you essentially lost sight of the point of the article which is that megapixels aren't everything when buying a camera.
SSD drives are the next big thing for storage ; however, a quick cost-benefit analysis over traditional hard disk storage would quickly show that SSD is presently something of a novelty. With greater vulnerability to unexpected loss of power and limited write ability, chances are that a $200 1 terabyte drive will outlast, outrun, and outdo an SSD - not to mention be cheaper. Unless if you're trying to use a laptop while using a pogostick, I have doubts that SSD will be able to unseat the reliability of hard drives, but hey - pogosticks and laptop use may take off!!
Oh, and while I enjoy using my 1080p monitor for my computer, I hate watching DVD's or Blue Rays on it. DVD's midly show compression because of the high def, and Blue-ray - while sharp, still shows too many artifacts to not give me a headache. Give me a Blue-ray player that is smooth and I won't complain as much.

" Everybody wang chung tonight "