zed47

I think the article that was posted misses very important issue:
In interlaced mode half the pixels are sent twice as often.
If the picture is rich in detail, and not changing much over time - like news broadcasts, progressive should be better.
If the contents change rapidly, you want higher refresh rate, so interlaced is better.

The problem with interlaced is that if the older part of the screen is still visible when the new part has been drawn, and if the picture has changed a lot, stripes will appear. To avoid this, you have to adjust the old part to take into account the new information in the new part. If you just replace it with the new part, pictures that change quickly will look good, but static pictures will loose half their detail. A more expensive solution is to move the old part so that it lines up with the new part. This compensates for motion to some degree, and removes the stripes.

The suggested best method was to convert interlaced signals to progressive with half the update frequency. This will give a result that has the same bad update frequency as progressive, but where every second line is only a rough approximation. By not showing the newest screen part as it comes in, information is destroyed.

Another problem is of course if the original media is progressive, but you can only transfer it as interlaced. If the conversion from progressive to interlaced is bad, information is lost. The best way for the tv to handle this signal depends on the conversion method used.
The best Bluray format for progressive is 1920x1080 at 24 Hz, and the best for interlaced is the same resolution with every half coming at 60 Hz. Both roughly 60 million pixels per second.