HDTV - Learn The Lingo Before You Buy
Who wants to go shopping for something that they really don't
know anything about? Or who wants to feel at the mercy of a
salesperson who rattles on with all the technical terms that
sound like a language from another planet? It's no wonder that
lots of people feel intimidated by shopping for electronics
products and especially is that true of television sets.
Let's start with HDTV. You hear about it all the time now, but
just what is it? The simple version is that it stands for High
Definition TV, and it is a quantum leap in the way that
television will be viewed in the future. It basically means that
the television signal is so dense with information on both the
video and audio side that the picture will be incredibly sharp
and smooth, and the sound is so good that it can actually rival
that of movie theaters.
On the video side, you need to understand the pixel to fully
appreciate the improvement in screen resolution. The televison
screen, just like your computer screen is made of up of lots of
small squares that have a part of the information that makes up
the whole picture. The more pixels on a screen the more
information about that picture and therefore the sharper the
image will appear.
Older analog TV screens often had about 480 lines of pixels in
it. HDTV can display up to 1080 lines instead, each with 1920
pixels, totalling up to a whopping two million+ pixels on the
screen as opposed to only 200,000 on the older analog screen.
That is ten times the information being displayed, and can give
you an idea of how much sharper the picture will be.
But the sound is much improved as well. The HDTV standard allows
for audio to be transmitted in Dolby 5.1 surround sound, which
is similar to the technology used in movie theaters these days.
This kind of sound puts you right in the middle of the action
and is more faithful to the way the sound was originally mixed
for that program.
Widescreen is another part of the HDTV experience that you will
hear about, and that refers to the ratio aspect of the screen.
An HDTV set has a 16:9 ratio, in other words for every 16 inches
wide the screen is also 9 inches tall. That aspect ratio more
closely resembles movie theater formats and so when viewing
movies you get to see all the action without losing anything on
the screen.
There is more to know about this new technology but if you
understand what we have discussed in this article it will help
you have more confidence in shopping for televisions in the
future.