[ARC Tech-109]

There is book smart then the reality of experience. Sadly I'm seeing a lot of "digital is always better" rhetoric here based on opinion than fact. Academics are no match for the reality of experience and these I have of 40 years of experience with. The reality is what you see on your fancy high-priced screen are little more than DSP enhanced figments. The movies like StarWars when released in 1977 (I was there at the theater for this) they were ALL shot at 24 FPS until the later episodes were done in CineAlta at a 24 FPS rate, this factually documented by Geoege Lucas himself. So to say that because my TV set is 1080i only I can't enjoy the full resolution of a BD doesn't hold any water, it is the number of scan lines NOT the interlacing that defines. The movies were transferred using a flying spot scanner BTW.
S-VGA was both interlaced and progressive depending on the scan rate and this was due to the horizontal sweep limitations and limitations of the RAMDAC of the day. There is just as much detail in interlace as there is in a full sweep being this is a function of bandwidth itself.
"The only use of an interlaced CRT TV set is watching interlaced programs." Once again false opinion. You just contradicted yourself with the later statement regarding the computer monitor. I can't speak for the remainder of the statement regarding the 1125 line format as Japan was doing their own thing and it ultimately failed.

"because NTSC has stuck with 4:3 interlace" what the??? 4:3 is the aspect ratio of the screen itself, divide the screen into 4 sections vertically and only 3 of them will fit one on top of the other, interlace is an odd/even field of 2:1 of equal number of scan lines one over the other. Because my CRT monitor is 1080i it CAN display the SAME bandwith and detail of your whiz-bang LCD or plasma with its DSP running in the background and look just as good and I CAN prove this without a doubt. The problem here is once again we are splitting hairs of opinion with the belief that one is "better" than the other. Digital has it's own set of issues and compromises just like analog has, the one difference here is digital has the technological advances to hide these flaws effectively making ice creme out of horse manure. In the real world we never see the real picture, everything is a compromise be it compression for transmission or storage space, raw costs and the buying public that for the most part judges by the cost on the bottom line.