Laptop with 'Full HD'

[Tbag]

I have a Sony Vaio AR61M laptop wihch has a blu-ray drive and a sticker on it with says '1080 Full HD'

I thought Full HD was 1080p, so whats this 1080i? 720p..........
Can the laptop view full hd videos because my screen is set at 1440x900 and I thought that proper full hd (1080p) res was 1920x1080

I downloaded a 1080p clip which used quicktime but when opened it was twice the size of my screen so I had to resize it.

I dont get it

[drjtech]

"Full HD" is a marketing term, not a technical specification.

-drjtech

[edDV]

I have a Sony Vaio AR61M laptop wihch has a blu-ray drive and a sticker on it with says '1080 Full HD'

I thought Full HD was 1080p, so whats this 1080i? 720p..........
Can the laptop view full hd videos because my screen is set at 1440x900 and I thought that proper full hd (1080p) res was 1920x1080

I downloaded a 1080p clip which used quicktime but when opened it was twice the size of my screen so I had to resize it.

I dont get it

Specs show the Sony Vaio AR61M laptop has a 17" 1440x900 LCD panel and an NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT display chipset. The 2D job of the GeForce is to scale any and all inputs to 1440x900 progressive for display on your LCD panel. It will probably scale about 5-10% larger than that and crop the result to 1440x900. This is known as overscan and is done to hide image edge artifacts.
http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Sony_VAIO_AR61M_VGN-AR61M/version.asp

The laptop also has an HDMI output. Maybe this can generate a 1920x1080p output from a BluRay disc to an HDTV. It should all be explained in your manual.

[me-eyes]

It is misleading - the laptop is capable of showing 1080p in all its glory... just not on its own LCD screen
You can only do this on an external screen via the HDMI cable.

Think yourself lucky - I have an AR31S model which although can show 1080p on the LCD, cannot smoothly playback hi-def movies encoded with the h.264 codec. I found this out after about 6 months - it can manage mpeg2 fine, but the CPU/GPU combo really struggles with this codec. Arse!

[edDV]

...it can manage mpeg2 fine, but the CPU/GPU combo really struggles with this codec. Arse!

99.97% of the fastest desktop CPU/GPU struggle with smooth h.264 playback. It may work under controlled test conditions but often skips when in normal use. Fortunately most BluRay discs are encoded MPeg2.