That is what You only scale what you need to. if you are getting 720p or 1080i cable service output it at that dont scale it to 1080p. And never use a tv scaler, A decent scaler costs big bucks. unless you look into the marvell Qdeo and soon to be sigma VXP
I direct source anything and everything I can.
Not 100% sure what you mean by TV scaler. I assume it's a separate scaler; I never suggested that. A proper TV should scale your image automatically if you set it to, which most TVs (all TVs I know) do by default. That's what I meant by upscaling; sorry if that was unclear.
What I was saying about sources is that most things today, when released in HD are 1080p. People with a 4k resolution TV would either not have the resolution they wanted, or an upscale, which BakaBT doesn't seem to advocate unless done perfectly; something I don't expect a TV to do. If TV's were advertised on PPI, then a 32" tv and a 34" TV would have different resolutions if PPI became a standard instead of resolution. Even then, movies would still be released in a certain resolution, which probably would be higher than 1080p, but still too high or too low for most people.
Upscaling isn't really relevant either, or at least the upscaling you are talking about. Note that BBT's rejection of upscaling deals with encoding a video originally made in a lower resolution into a higher resolution (typically encoding 720p blu-ray into a 1080p video), which obviously gives you no benefits, as your media player should do that automatically anyway, so you are left with an identical video in a much larger file. On-the-fly scaling performed by the TV/media player is what we are talking about here, which I'm pretty sure BBT assumes everyone does. And by the way, BBT rejects pretty much all upscales, including those "done perfectly."
On the second point, you seem to be assuming that the 32" will be advertised as the same PPI as the 34", which it probably wouldn't be. Resolutions usually have to be one of several certain fixed resolutions, like 1366 x 768, 1920 x 1080, etc. A 32" and a 34" would likely have the same resolution (of course, this depends on the models), but the 34" would thus have a lower PPI than the 32".
