Connecting a 720p laptop to a 50 inch 1080P TV, what's going to happen?

[Newbiemember]

If my laptop is 720p resolution and I connect it to a 1080p 50inch TV, How is everything going to look on the TV? will image be at full size? Does it look worse, or better than it is on the laptop? What about upscaling? Are there going to be compatibility issues created from the lower resolution laptop being put together with the higher resolution TV, such as black line and black square around the edges, some part of the desktop can't be seen, really bad pixelation...,etc. What exactly is upscaling anyway and how and when does it happen, does it happen the moment you hook your TV and PC up? Then if my laptop was also 1080p, the same resolution as th TV, how would the picture have been different? would I see improvements?

 

[whm1974]

The laptop should display 1080p just fine on a larger screen.

 

[nathanddrews]

Assuming that you connect your laptop to your TV using HDMI, you will have several options:

1. Duplicate/mirror Display - both your laptop and TV will show the exact same 720p image.

2. Extend Display - your laptop and TV will each display their own unique content together as one single desktop. You can drag windows from one screen to the other. In this scenario, the laptop will stay at 720p and the TV will operate at 1080p. So you will have to choose which screen to display your content on.

3. Exclusive Display - the laptop will display nothing and the TV will run the desktop at 1080p.

In any mode not sending 1080p to the TV, the TV will either scale to fit the screen automatically or have black borders around all four sides. Every TV is different and this will depend upon the settings on your TV. Usually you can choose options on the TV like "fit", "stretch", "wide", etc. to make it fit exactly as you expect. In some cases, some TVs also have an "overscan" setting that will force the four edges of your desktop off of the screen. Not all TVs let you adjust this, but you can always use the built-in GPU scaling to correct it if you need to.

Also remember to set your audio device as the HDMI/TV device if you want sound to come from the TV instead of the laptop. It may or may not do it automatically.

Good luck.