High-definition TV lines up to be the next frontier
Once TV screens broke the 26-inch barrier, and began to get ever-larger, the battle was on for the manufacturers and TV companies to be able to offer a format which could ensure that owners got the best out of their equipment’s new capabilities.
Over the past couple of years, flat-screen televisions have gone from being the preserve of the top-end manufacturers and retailers, and playthings of the rich, to an essential for any home which is serious about its TV viewing. And the march of technology has continued. Now that flat screens are the norm, the next holy grail of television producers, and the manufacturers of the equipment, will be high-definition.
The extra richness of colour and picture quality comes from the greater number of lines of which a TV’s picture is composed. A standard television signal consists of 576 horizontal lines, and 720 vertical lines. A high-definition TV is capable of plotting a picture using either 720 or 1080 lines. Essentially, this means the pixels or dots which make up the television’s picture are closer together, meaning that the overall picture looks brighter, sharper and more detailed.
It is important to remember that the quality of the picture which any TV set can receive will only be as good as that in which the programme is filmed. The substantial differences in picture quality between one manufacturer’s HD televisions and those from another maker are accounted for by the type of scaling mechanism used to convert the picture and make it suitable for high-definition broadcast.
A second factor which influences the quality of a high-definition TV image is whether the screen produces its images as a single frame – this is known as ‘progressive’ format – or the image consists of two ‘interlaced’ fields. In quality terms, a progressive image will always looks sharper than one which has been interlaced – it is as if you can’t see the join.
TV companies and most producers apart from Hollywood film-makers are still some way off producing their content in the ultimate 1080 progressive format, but a 1080p screen is capable of optimising any TV image for its format, and of showing all TV content without the need to scale it to fit the available screen area. Most 1080p screens are referred to as ‘full HD’, and are the nearest anyone will get to enjoying a cinema-quality picture at home. So for connoisseurs, this is the standard to aim for.
All the important details of the latest available models of Panasonic LCD TVs and LG LCD TVs can be seen by going online, where models can be compared and the best prices tracked down.
About the Author
Convert SD videos to HD using freeware converter