Question about PC/TV resolutions

[Wrath]

I own an iMac that can display resolutions up to 1920x1080 pixels (standard).

Out of curiosity I just switched to 720p and immediately noticed the difference with everything being less sharp and bigger on my monitor. Then I compared the result with my 6 year-old bedroom HD-Ready TV (up to 720p) by turning on my PS3 and personally thought it looked better (as in more detailed) than my iMac on 720p.

Is this my eyes playing tricks on me because I am so used to the 1080p resolution on my computer or do TVs work differently? I mean, my TV has a bigger screen size than my iMac but still gives me a better display in 720p. Of course, if I change it back to 1080p my computer outshines the TV by a great deal, no questions asked.

But how come that you can see the difference on computer monitors so easily (even it it's a smaller screen) while TVs with less than 40 inch make it very hard to distinguish Full HD from HD-Ready?

Any insight on this?

[keefy]

Usign a resolution below your native monitor resolution always looks crap.

TV and the consoles themselves upscale the image but computers just feed it exactly as it is.

[Wrath]

Usign a resolution below your native monitor resolution always looks crap.

TV and the consoles themselves upscale the image but computers just feed it exactly as it is.

Interesting. What does that mean though?

[Tutankhamun]

You can't compare resolutions this way, an iMac does not display a "720p" resolution. The p in TV resolution stands for progressive and is a qualification to tell how the TV draws pixels on the screen. This is not how your iMac display works.

As for the iMac, the reason a lower resolution looks worse and bigger than your native resolution is pixel density. Your iMac has the exact pixels it needs to draw an 1920x1080 image. So you would need 1:1 scaling to make lower resolutions look as good as the native one.