Blessed by the Potato

It’s only been a few days, and the only decision we’ve made on the HDTV front is to wait to see what boxing day sales bring.

One thing I’ve been thinking of is that so many reviews say that the physical screen itself is not all that different between brands, and that 1080p vs 720p is not such a big deal. However, the scalers and other software can have big impacts on how the final image comes out with a source that isn’t matched to the native resolution (and what might contribute to SD looking like crap) and things like step artifacts. So I was wondering, is it possible to create a test DVD/blu-ray to take into stores to see how various screens handle certain test patterns and video at different resolutions? I obviously don’t have a blu-ray burner, and I don’t know how possible it is to make a high def video clip (h.264?) on a DVD that will play on a TV, let alone one for different hi-def formats and framerates, but it could be a useful tool to make up.