by Alex Yee

Created on: February 23, 2007   Last Updated: May 04, 2007

After a visit to my local electronics store today I realized that they are not explaining what is happening to television today. Sure everyone is buying flat panel televisions like there's no tommorrow but do they know what they are buying. Well I'm here to explain what High Definition (HD) really means and how it is going to affect you.

Well let me start by saying that not all flat panel TVs are High-def, contrary to belief. In the EU televisions have to have a HD ready sticker on the box to confirm that the TV is high definition. However to complicate things even more there are 4 different resolutions.

In PAL standard type televisions show us images in a resolution called 576p. This means that 576 horizontal lines make up your display. The 'p' part means that all the lines are progressive which means they are all working at once. There is also 576i which means the same thing on the line part. However the i means that the lines are interlaced which means that half of the lines are working at once and they swap between each other. This means that you do lose a slight amount of resolution and the image will be more flickery. The only advantage of interlacing is that it has a better frame rate. The only difference in NTSC televisions are that they use 480 lines (480p and 480i).

The high definition resolutions start with two 720 lined resolutions: 720p and 720i. To tell the difference between standard definition and high definition you usually need a TV larger than 26 inches. the next two resolutions are 1080i and 1080p. 1080i is actually very similar to 720p in resolution. 1080p is sometimes referred to as full HD or True HD. This is because it is the highest resolution available to consumers. To tell the difference between 1080p from other HD resolutions you need a TV which is 32 inches or larger. Now you may be asking what does all these resolutions provide for me. Well you will be able to see everything in greater detail. The hairs on a person's head, the crowd in football games, the detail of every sportsman's moves and HD will imerse you in a film, TV show or live televised event. HD is much more than a larger screen.

Now you may now be confused between Plasma sets and LCD sets. Well they are not much different in price or size. However here are a list of differences:

-Plasma screens are know to suffer burnt in images. This happens when something which doesn't move is on the screen for a long time. This could be a paused film or a score bar from a videogame.

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