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[redmerc]

...and now i'm awake.
I understand crt and such work in a way where the image is rendered BIGGER (the screen isnt stretching the image to fit on the set number of pixels like LCD) and the ablilty to have sharp lines is there because pixels arent just made bigger; they are drawn on correctly.

Do all xbox 360 games support rendering the image at 1080p? I would imagine they wont which means the image would be upsized.. simply due to the fact that because of such a high resolution, it'll be like a computer and framerate would drop significantly (this is how it works, right?) or not because xbox wasn't designed for a small monitor.. lol help me!

Red.

[SphtKr76]

Yes, all games support 1080p since the scaling is being done by the console, its not a native output by the game. I don't know of any 22" monitors that support 1080p though. Most 24's will be 1920*1200 native, so 1080p will work well with those, you will either have black bars top and bottom or the monitor will upscale the image further to fit the screen, depends on the monitor and what options it has. My personal experience with PC monitors has been very good, I use a Dell 2005fpw (1680*1050 native) for lan parties and such with my 360 Elite, and so far all the games look great to my eyes. One other thing to wathc for is if the monitor is HDCP compliant if you want to watch upscaled DVD's or HD-DVD's on it, of course you can always use the VGA cable to bypass that. Good luck with your search, and don't rule out some of the bigger LCD's (32-37") in your search.

[twistedsymphony]

for the absolute best picture you should buy an LCD with a native resolution of 1280x720 because 95% of all Xbox 360 games render to that resolution... if your monitor supports that then neither the Xbox nor your Monitor will be scaling the image at all, with an HDMI connection it'd be essentially straight through 1 to 1 mapping  from the frame buffer to the pixels on your screen.

a 1680x1050 will guarantee that and at least one and most likely BOTH the Xbox AND your monitor will do some scaling operations because the Xbox 360 is incapable of scaling to that resolution, and of course you lose image fidelity with each scaling op the image goes through.

[Omnix1299]

look its all pretty Easy. It doesnt matter which monitor you buy. The xbox 360 does almost all of the Work. you are also a little confused on what Native Resolution is. To keep it Simple. its the Resolution at which the monitor supports best. It doesnt mean that it cant support other resolutions. it just means for best picture use that resolution. Now, not all monitors are Widescreen but HD is most definitely Widescreen oriented. whether HD gaming is the same or not i cannot say. but it makes little difference. Dont worry about 720p or 1080p on a monitor that is too small to support 1080 you cant humanly tell a difference between any of it. Also the Xbox 360 support a wide range of resolutions so you shouldnt have any problem finding a resolution that will match your monitor. Another thing to keep in mind is that the way the xbox 360 determines resolutions for a wide screen monitor is a tad different than a computer does. so make sure to try almost every one to find the best fit. any to just sum up anything.... any LCD computer monitor is HD. though not every LCD TV is. Any CRT computer monitor than can support any resolution 1024x768 or higher is HD. All computer Monitors run in Progressive scan. just information that you may have been wondering. Also if you are not worried about cost, i suggest getting an Active Matrix LCD. They are less Prone to Ghosting and are veiwable at MUCH wider veiwing angles.


And to answer your questions.
the difference between a 22" 1280x720 and a 1680x1050 is the native resolution. when you get up to bigger screen sizes it takes more expensive components to render higher resolutions natively. it doesnt have so much to do with the pixel size so much as how many pixels there are per square inch.
Because an LCD monitor supports a certain resolution the best forcing it to go at a higher resolution can cause blurring. And because a computer can go up to a certain resolution doesnt mean that the monitor it self can.

[twistedsymphony]

QUOTE(redmerc @ Jul 9 2007, 10:25 AM)

What's the difference between a 22" 1280x720 monitor and a 1680x1050 monitor; it's obviously not the screensize, so is it the size of the pixels?.. I don't understand how it works.

Yes if the physical screen dimensions are the same and one has a lower native resolution you are correct that the actual size of the pixels is smaller on the higher native res screen.

QUOTE(redmerc @ Jul 9 2007, 10:25 AM)

Also, if I had 1280x720 wouldn't my computer look worse on the screen as it's a lower resolution, because my computer is able to render at 1680x1050. Saying this i don't understand how an image at 1280x720 would look better than an image at 1680x1060 if it's the same " monitor. Are the pixels in the 1280x720 bigger than monitor that runs at 1680x1060 and if so then its pretty much causing the same problem as the image can't be as sharp as the 1680x1050 because they pixels bigger anyway.. if somone understands what i just said, can you clear it up for me hahaha

Red.

yes 1280x720 would look worse than 1680x1050 when used with a computer that supports both. The reason that the 360 looks better at 1280x720 is because the 360 DOES NOT SUPPORT 1680x1050...

Since the 360 doesn't support that resolution your monitor has to stretch out the 360's video data to fit and as a result that stretching can deteriorate the image quality.... An extreme example would be like watching a youtube video in full screen.... the video wasn't mean to be stretched out to that many pixels and it really trashes the quality.... stretching out the 360's video feed is not THAT extreme but you get the idea.

The question YOU have to ask yourself is if a higher resolution when using it with a PC is more important then not stretching out your 360 games. 1280x720 isn't much for a PC resolution... but that resolution was never meant to be used with PCs.

whenever you buy devices with the intent of using them for multiple purposes you have to make compromises somewhere.

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QUOTE(Omnix1299 @ Jul 9 2007, 01:29 PM)

look its all pretty Easy. It doesnt matter which monitor you buy. The xbox 360 does almost all of the Work. you are also a little confused on what Native Resolution is. To keep it Simple. its the Resolution at which the monitor supports best. It doesnt mean that it cant support other resolutions. it just means for best picture use that resolution.

YOU are the one who is confused here.. I think redmerc actually has a better grasp on the concept than you do. LCDs are "Fixed Pixel" displays imagine the screen like a large grid of LEDS..  each LED represents a pixel and you can never change the number of LEDs it's permanent, it's always the same... the native resolution is the number of pixels the screen ACTUALLY has. Any other "supported" resolutions must be converted to the screens native resolution. So if you feed your 1280x720 screen a 640x480 image the circuitry must stretch that 640x480 to fit inside the 1280x720 grid of pixels.... similarly if you sent it a 1920x1080 image it must squish the image to fit inside the 1280x720 grid of pixels.

When you use the native resolution there is no stretching or squishing so the picture you send to the screen is exactly the picture you get on the screen without worrying if the circuitry ruined it in the conversion process.

QUOTE(Omnix1299 @ Jul 9 2007, 01:29 PM)

Dont worry about 720p or 1080p on a monitor that is too small to support 1080 you cant humanly tell a difference between any of it.

When talking about HDTVs in most cases 720p or even 480p is the most people can humanly discern.... though at the distance you sit to a computer monitor most people can actually tell the difference... so it is something he should think about:

here's a graph I made for reference:

if you're interested in the math behind it go here: http://www.audioholi...of-human-vision

QUOTE(Omnix1299 @ Jul 9 2007, 01:29 PM)

Also the Xbox 360 support a wide range of resolutions so you shouldnt have any problem finding a resolution that will match your monitor. Another thing to keep in mind is that the way the xbox 360 determines resolutions for a wide screen monitor is a tad different than a computer does. so make sure to try almost every one to find the best fit.

Yes the 360 does support a wide range of resolutions... but NO it DOES NOT support 1680x1050, nor does it support 1440x900 or any other popular widescreen PC monitor resolutions. It's unfortunate but that's the way it is.

There is no need to try multiple output resolutions if you can select an output resolution that matches the native resolution of the monitor. The only reason you'd have to do this is to find the resolution that gets squished or stretched the right amount as to do the least amount of damage to the picture quality.