Learn more about your viewing options and what to look for in this 3-part series on HDTV each day at Noon eastern
"HD is coming, HD is coming!" HDTV, or high-definition television, is looming on the horizon. HDTV also goes hand-in-hand with digital television because most are already digitally-equipped, and as
AT Home Tech editor
Ryan wrote about,
the end of analog TV is near.
HDTVs receive a TV signal that contains more picture information than a standard TV signal. A standard TV picture is made of 512 lines, no matter how big or little the screen is; an HDTV is made up of either 720 or 1080 lines.
The 720 line HDTV create a picture by displaying 720 lines of information in one pass, usually making motion smoother than compared with a 1080 line HDTV, but with fewer total lines.
The 1080 line HDTV creates a picture by displaying the even numbered lines of information, then switching to the odd numbered lines so fast that the eye doesn't detect the transition and it looks like a solid picture.
Before buying an HDTV set up, make sure that you watch "regular" TV on it, as the majority of TV is still non-HD; the quality isn't often improved in the "regular" TV setting. Also note that DVD movies usually don't look better on an HDTV without an HD-DVD player (more on that in Day 3's post). DVD players listed as 480p are the "enhanced" type; players listed as 480i are the standard type. Most DVD players only produce a standard TV resolution and the ones who claim to have "enhanced" resolution use progressive scanning to produce only marginally better picture quality.
Stop back tomorrow to learn more about HDTV set options.
I bought my parents a (720p) HD set for Christmas this year. The catch for them is that they don't have cable. Or satellite. They get TV from a regular broadcast antenna my dad mounted on the roof 20 years ago. I bought it with the assumption that it would convince them to upgrade to cable, which they have been hemming and hawing about for 10 years. Amazingly, when we connected it up to the antenna and did a channel search, we were able to get the digital versions of all the broadcast stations perfectly (except CBS, which only came in HD for the Super Bowl and NCAA basketball) with that ancient antenna. Unlike with cable, the difference between a broadcast analog signal and even the non-HD digital signal is immediately noticable.
I guess I just succeeded in future-proofing them for a few more years...
view Ondrej's profile
OK, this post is close but not quite accurate. There are three types of HDTV displays: 720p, 1080i, and 1080p. "i" means interlaced and "p" means progressive. Progressive is one frame after another (like film strip frames), while interlaced is a method of combining multiple frames into one alternating lines. Interlaced images tend to look a bit jaggy and jumpy. Unless you are talking about an analog set capable of HDTV resolutions (like a big CRT projection setup with 9" tubes), however, everything you watch is going to end up as progressive. This is because digital displays are natively progressive. Part of the equation determining how good the display looks is how well the deinterlacing is done (be this at the display or at the source).
So when you use a digital TV you are either watching a 720p image or a 1080p image, with differing qualities of de-interlacing depending on the source you feed it.
Honestly there is quite a bit going on here that is tough to describe in a post. I'd recommend that anyone wanting to learn about this stuff read this article: http://hometheaterhifi.com/volume_14_1/feature-article-1080p-3-2007-part-1.html
It's the best description of new formats (especially 1080p) that I've read.
You may also want to follow it up with this article to better understand just where your deinterlacing is happening:
http://www.audioholics.com/education/display-formats-technology/video-processing-in-dvd-players-receivers-and-displays
view Max's profile
Ondrej - Nice try...and thanks for the laugh!
Max - Thanks for taking the time to further explain; you are definitely correct in saying it's a lot to describe in a post...I am coming back around to some of this on day 3, so thanks for the resources!
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