I ran across one early report of the unit that claims that 720 resolution is not upscaled to 1080, and instead is just displayed in a smaller screen region. That correlates with other reports that SMD did not include a hardware scaler with the product, and would mean that it does not make use of the entire FOV when displaying 720p 3D at 60Hz. I hope that's not true.

Me too. Upscaled 720p 3D is a lot less taxing on the GPU than 1080p SBS 3D.

Could you give a link to the report ?

The 05/19/2012 comments
http://www.siliconmicrodisplay.com/1/post/2012/05/update-product-configuration.html#comments

Does it mean that the diagonal view angle is effectively lowered from 45 to 30 for 720p. If that's the case it's not good for 720p gaming.

They can't be serious! Why would they release a product in such a state??!?!!

If it's true, then it's no go for 3D Vision gamer as it doesn't support SBS or TnS.

At least the firmware is updateable. I can see where they would want to focus on getting the product out there, and fixing stuff later.

Assuming, of course, this is something they can fix.

what i don't get from this "problem", first everyone complained about that 720p scaled to a 1080p monitor would make the picture quality bad.

So now everyone want that "bad quality feature" as they didn't include it? why? so you can rant about the bad picture quality when looking on the scaled picture?

i know about the icon size and other uses where the zoom might be nice(dunno if its possible to get a function in the controller to switch scaler on and off)

On the other hand its just one report up to now. I have here games too, that even when my monitor is 1080p(normaly its scales movies and games), that don't scale that one.
Maybe Nvidia Driver bug or something else, last game i had that was i think Darkfall Online, but not sure.

maybe there is a short hotfix to enable upscaling in the graphic card driver?
think its up to now a bit to early to make it a big nogo(maybe for consoleros and AR people its now a disappointment)

That's quite subjective. A poor scaling would certainly look bad; for instance, if every other line was doubled. I have a HP monitor (LP2475w) that suffers from something like this.. it doesn't seem to be that even, but it certainly does double lines unevenly causing seams all over, which looks crappy particularly when the view rotates. There are a bunch of other ways to scale too, some from signal theory (where the pixel values are regarded as point samples) and some more suited for computer graphics (where we may regard a pixel as a filled rectangle).
For the particular case of 720 to 1080 scaling, I would like to see the rectangle based mode, meaning a pixel group like this:

Is scaled into something like this:

(Where abcd means average of those pixels.) This is the filled rectangle interpretation of a 2:3 scaling with equal pixel aspect ratio. Technically you'd want the averaging to be color accurate too (taking gamma into account), but that can be sacrificed (though there's no reason to if the display acts linearly).

The reason to do this scaling is to preserve field of view. For SD resolutions, you want uneven scaling to recover aspect ratio. What would be really unacceptable is a scaler that prevents a direct pixel mapping; some TVs do that, to satisfy ancient overscan conventions.

Considering that 720P without scaling would be a lesser FOV, no-one anticipated this as a 'solution' to 720P scaling issues. Which no one ever really complained about anyway, just noted its disadvantages, compared to full speed 1080P rendering.

Since the hmd doesn't support 1080P 3D at over 30hz, this means that for 3D @ decent frame rates you'll need to run at 720P. Its going to hold back their sales unless they can fix this (or it turns out to just be a false report, I am not going to jump to any conclusions just yet).

I'm guessing that it would require a new controller box, not just a firmware update to fix. So at least you would not need to upgrade the entire unit. I guess it's possible that you could fix this with a Windows display driver as well and do the upscaling on the video card. But I don't know enough about it to understand how the driver would fit into the rendering and transmission pipeline. Hopefully you could catch and upscale the frames before they were encoded into HDMI. Of course this is only an option for PC's. If you are talking about broadcast signals (sat & tv) and console games, then you're screwed without a hardware scaler.

What I don't understand is that it supports SBS, so it must have some scaling capabilities if it can scale the half res up to full res.

So the other resolutions like 640*480 would be small also ?
That seems strange they would over look this.
I hope the guy just missed a setting in the menu.
The funny thing is, I would probably only be using the lower resolutions when I want a Big Blown-Up, Fat Looking screen display. I would not be using 640*480 for sharp text, thats what 1080 resolution is for.

SMD have now confirmed that the device does not currently scale, and they will offer the option to scale 720 in a firmware update in about a month.

I agree with SMD that you want to pixel map, thats why I'll stay away form this product until 1080p@60hz is accepted, which it probably wont be for a long time if they cant hack support for it somehow :/

That's great news! Strange that they did not realize during development that this would be an important feature, but it is wonderful that they are so responsive to customer needs and inquiries.

Ok, that's at least good to hear they are working on it. Seems like a massive over-sight, though.

I haven't had any recent experience from scalers, but I was a late adopter of TFT screens and one of the reasons where that you were locked to one res. and if you went out side of that the image quality was like crap. I hope its not the case with more modern controllers

I just wonder if the scaler is not build into the hardware, how good would the scaler be if it's implemented in software.

It will be ugly. But we expected that. It will probably still be more immersive than 3/4 of the same FOV.

Kind of makes you want the Rift to be out already tho, doesn't it. I mean, all this money, just for the same crappy low FOV, even tho there is all that resolution to be used in providing more definition.

Let's get some perspective here. A year ago we were ok with a 800x600 display and we were jumping up and down just thinking about a 720 display. Now we are nitpicking about upscaling to 1080. Let's give SMD a little credit. They really delivered a great product.

Agreed brantlew! I've only been looking at HMDs for a year and even so I feel like this is a huge breakthrough in the technology! SMD as a company deserves a lot of kudos for their innovation and for their accountability to their customers. I love Apple products and I think it is a great company but honestly if they made this product and didn't have scaling, not only would they probably not even admit to that for a long time but their response to the issue with new software may not come for months and with hardware for at least a year (iphone 4 antenna issue anyone?)

@brantlew: Yes, you are right. SMD still deserves credit for coming this far. They still have a decent product, and I hope it does well.

I'd be happy with even 640x480 resolution if I could get a decent FOV.