which smart tv is most compatible with apple products?

Csound1 wrote:

The Standard to be met to market a TV as an HDTV (EU/US/Japan) requires these 3 resolutions.

High-definition television (HDTV):

• 720p (1280 × 720 progressive scan)
• 1080i (1920 × 1080 split into two interlaced fields of 540 lines)
• 1080p (1920 × 1080 progressive scan)

So they must be non standard TV's

I don't want to confuse things any more than they might already be, & I am not absolutely sure of this, but I believe that in the US, to market a TV as an HDTV one, it must support at least one of those three HD resolutions. As a practical matter, the processing bandwidth required for 720p & 1080i are very nearly the same, so if the TV supports one it is almost certain to support the other. The bandwidth required for 1080p is higher & requires more expensive circuitry, so some less expensive models (at least in the past) did not support it but could still be marketed as HDTV's. Also, since over the air HD TV broadcasts in the US are either 720p or 1080i depending on the network, like I said it would be very difficult to sell a HD model that could only display some networks in HD.

Winston Churchill wrote:

There is a secondary issue (or maybe I suppose, the only issue) that some TV's don't properly broadcast (all) the resolutions they support and when this occurs the Apple TV doesn't offer them in it's 'TV Resolution' settings, however there were users who could set their Apple TV up to use ED or SD, so I'd assume they were otherwise capable of setting it up to use 720p if it was possible.

I was not aware that ATV's won't offer a resolution the TV doesn't explicitly say it can support (via EDID I presume). Are you certain this is true, & if so, is it true for all generations?

I only have the ATV3, & the TV it is connected to supports essentially every SD, ED, & HD resolution there is up to & including 1080p, so I don't have any way of testing this. However, when I go into the settings menu & change the TV output to anything other than "auto" it always hen displays a confirmation screen asking if I can see that, with a timed reversion to auto if I don't confirm that I can. I assumed that was because when not in auto mode, it ignored the EDID info, but maybe that is a bad assumption?

Anyway, given all the quirks & poor implementations of the EDID standard in older TV's, I suppose it is possible that a 720p capable TV would not indicate that, or would not indicate that it was a native resolution, & that caused setup problems.

Correct about the bandwidth requirements, if it can do 1080p it can do them all. I interpret the standards as meaning that it must receive all (not any) of the three broadcast standards in use for HDTV, but a clearer answer is hard to get.

I have an ATV3 and my TV supports all those so I let it choose for itself, I stream movies at 720p from iTunes and they work fine (usually look better than the cable does)

It does not seem like a big deal, most sets will work.

Yes that's still correct so far as I can tell. I don't know if you recall but I asked in the lounge sometime back for others to check theirs so I wasn't missing any when I createdthis page which is part of a simulated menu I use with my phone for checking menu items when I'm participating here and am not in front of the Apple TV. There were people who said they didn't have the full list themselves.

Csound1 wrote:

Correct about the bandwidth requirements, if it can do 1080p it can do them all. I interpret the standards as meaning that it must receive all (not any) of the three broadcast standards in use for HDTV, but a clearer answer is hard to get.

Like I said, in the U.S. over-the-air broadcast high definition TV is limited to 720p or 1080i, so a HDTV need not support 1080p to receive that programming. There are also very few U.S. cable providers that offer any 1080p programming, so unless one has a BluRay player, a third generation ATV, or something similar, 1080p would be a useless, expensive requirement.

But more to the point, when I first stared shopping for HDTV's right after the FCC mandated the switch to digital OTA broadcasting, there were quite a few lower priced TV's from the major manufacturers that supported 720p & 1080i but not 1080p, & they were marketed as HDTV's. The ones that offered 1080p were substantially more expensive. Of course, the marketing requirements may have changed since then, but I think it is just that it has gotten cheaper to provide 1080p processing.

I remember that the 'premium' HDTV's (in the early days) often lacked 1080p so who knows. But I still can't locate a single example of one that lacks (or lacked) 720p.

It seems that nowadays you'll get all 3, at least. but I will hold out for UHDTV: 8640p (15360 × 8640 progressive scan)

I'm not really sure either what the standards are for marketing an HD TV, but I'm not sure it requires all 3 of those HD standards to be supported, I'm 100% sure I've seen TV's that don't support 1080p but do the other two resolutions and I rather think my TV in my office at work doesn't support 1080i but does the other resolutions. I'm also not convinced that being able to support any or all 3 of those resolutions necessarily makes a TV an HD TV either. In the early days resellers that sold TV's that output at 576 but supported HD were supposed to be market them as HD ready rather than HD.

It makes some kind of sense to omit 1080p as it requires more from the TV than the other 2. But if it supports 1080i then 720p is possible. If it is not there I suspect some other reason (not that I can imagine one) even a marketing choice seems unlikely?

Csound1 wrote:

It makes some kind of sense to omit 1080p as it requires more from the TV than the other 2. But if it supports 1080i then 720p is possible. If it is not there I suspect some other reason (not that I can imagine one) even a marketing choice seems unlikely?

Technically, it takes more on-board processing to display a non-native resolution than a native one, so for instance a TV with a naive resolution of 1920 X 1080 pixels has to do more processing to display a 1280 X 720 image than a 1080i one, but the same thing is true to a greater or lesser extent for any other non-native resolution, so I don't think that is a factor.

But I think Winston has a point about some TV's having a poor EDID implementation, that when user error isn't involved the most likely explanation is the TV is telling the ATV it can't display something that it actually can.

Yes, that sounds feasible.

Most of my HDTV experience comes from show presentation, so often I'm dealing with 12, 15 or 18 monitors (widescreen arrangement) edge to edge to form a much larger display. All run at 720p. aspect ratio is controlled by the number of columns of TV's. I have never had an issue finding 720p compatibility to rent or buy but as we move toward higher resolutions (UHDTV etc) they may become rarer.

R C-R wrote:

Technically, it takes more on-board processing to display a non-native resolution than a native one, so for instance a TV with a naive resolution of 1920 X 1080 pixels has to do more processing to display a 1280 X 720 image than a 1080i one, but the same thing is true to a greater or lesser extent for any other non-native resolution, so I don't think that is a factor.

Just thinking that through a couple of points for a moment without necessarily disagreeing with this.

I can see that scaling may require some processing power that a native resolution doesn't, but that assumes that the display has a screen size of 1920x1080 to begin with (one of my TV's has a screen size of 1366x768)

I'm not quite sure 1:1 mapping is a realistic expectation, I thought that modern TV's still used overscan, in which case wouldn't any advantage discussed in the point above be negated.

1080i would need de-interlacing for a modern progressive screen (LCD, Plasma etc etc), 720p wouldn't, so the 1080i may consume processing power doing this where the 720p wouldn't.

1080 source needs cropping from 1088 since 1080 doesn't allow whole macro blocks, would it therefor not require a little more processing to do this since the 720 source won't need cropping.

1080i has around 10% more macro blocks (assuming it has twice as many fields/sec as the 720p has frames/sec), which I think likely would require more processing, not only because there are more of them but because the data in them is more highly compressed ** (assuming an equal data rate and quality) and may require more processing to decompress them.

(** the image data will not only be more compressed because there has to be less data per macro block but since the macro block structure also consumes space there is also disproportionally less room for data too)

This could all be turned somewhat on it's head though because whilst 720p is almost invariably 1280 x 720, 1080i can be broadcast at 1440x1080 or even 960x1080 by using non-square pixels.

I think there may well be many other things I haven't mentioned or don't know about that could affect the processing power that is needed for 1080i v 720p, however whilst I'm yet to be convinced that 1080i might need less processing power than 720p, I do accept they are probably reasonably similar when compared to 1080p

How about present : February 2016 ?

We are considering buying

SONY X830C 4K Ultra HD

or

SONY X930D / X940D 4K HDR

Thank you very much

Zelika

I don't see any reason that either should be a problem.