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Comment by keltex | Hacker News Reader

Dropping 1080p is a mistake. Yeah, 1080p looks the same as 720p at normal viewing distances, but most consumers don't believe it. They got that 1080p TV and by god they want 1080p content. Even if it's highly-compressed artifact ridden video from their cable company.

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I don't know. If apple were to market this iTV device as just "HD" without talking resolution at all, probably using adjectives like "magic", I believe that people would buy it for that HD aspect and not care about resolution.

Aside of that, I agree. There's no visible difference between 1080p and 720p, even on my installation with a 3m screen and 5m projection distance.

Interestingly enough, 3D rendered movies might look a tad bit better in 1080p, but only ever so slightly.

A highly compressed 1080P movie encoded in H264 must be something like 10GB or so? For the average US broadband connection (4Mbit/sec) that's going to take at least 54 minutes. No one wants to experience buffering in the middle of a movie so that would probably be a 10-15 minute buffering period before you started watching. That might be a little too much. They could do something like play locally cached movie trailers while the movie did its first 10-15m of buffering for a movie theater-ish experience. Steve Jobs singing "Let's all go to the lobby" Monty Burns style would work too.

If anyone can pull off the consumer education necessary to make 720p seem okay, Apple can. There's plenty of angles: storage constraints (show number of videos that can be stored at each resolution), download speed (esp. considering the sorry state of "broadband" in the US), watch-as-you-download vs. watch it tomorrow, and perceived quality at normal viewing distances.

Knowing Apple, they will just say "HD" and keep the tech specs off the main product page. Only us techies will complain.

Not that it's a bad thing. Apple has convinced consumers that they will provide a quality product (and they will), so they don't need to stoop to number wars.

720p moves into the realm of instant download / gratification vs. making consumers wait - I think Apple's hitting the mark.

I'd prefer 1080p but my experience downloading 1080p movies on the PS3 has been frustrating - an 8gb+ file takes a really long time vs. a well compressed 2.5 - 3gig file for 720p resolution which is quite a bit faster on standard cable modem / download.

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