HDTV Guide

Television has changed

We have seen black & white pictures turn to colour, analogue signals becoming digital and now the ultimate in picture quality in the form of High Definition TV. It brings clarity, colour and definition never seen before on a TV.

How does it work? 

High Definition technology relies mainly on the number of lines that the TV has to ‘draw’ the picture. When we talk about picture quality we refer to resolution. This is made up of many lines of pixels. The more of these lines of pixels there are on screen the better the resolution and, therefore, the picture quality.

Plasma Television sales have not grown as much as LCD Televisions have, partly because plasma screens have a shorter life span and use more energy.

Panasonic and Pioneer still make Plasma TVs but other companies like Sony and Toshiba have pulled any from the technology preferring to invest heavily in LCD. New flat screen technologies to watch out for in the coming years are OLED and SED TVs.

What makes a TV HD Ready?

An HD ready TV must have HDMI or DVI connectivity in order to accept a digital signal from the HD receiving equipment, as well as an analogue Component (YpbPr) connection. It must also be able to handle the 720 or 1080 line formats.

What is the difference between 1080HD and standard 720 HD TV?

The key difference with these models is the screen resolution. The general rule is the more pixels used the better the standard of picture the TV has to offer. A 1920 x 1080 TV has around 2 million pixels whereas a standard 1366 x 768 TV only has around 1 million pixels. 

It is important to note that there are two different types of 1080 HD TV – 1080i and 1080p.

1080i televisions use an interlaced scanning system meaning each odd line of the picture is displayed, followed by each even line, and the resulting image is not as smooth as a progressive feed.

1080p televisions use a progressive scanning system, which display each line on the screen simultaneously. As a result the image displayed suffers less apparent flicker than 1080i

1080p, which is sometimes referred to as ‘Full High Definition”, offers the best picture available however requires a 1080p source such as Blu-ray to achieve this picture. The current highest broadcast standard available is 1080i, and this is set to be the case for the foreseeable future.