Understanding Full HD TV Resolutions

The display capabilities of the Full HD TV is what the entire technology is all about. Any TV set is judged by the vibrancy of colors it can offer to the viewer and by the quality of the picture than can be viewed. Whether it is through a computer attachment or a satellite dish, the picture quality and the display features are what will move people into buying the television. When it comes to high definition tv, the Full HDTV is simply the best money can buy. And the entire reason for this is their resolution.

Although most Full HD TVs share many features that are superior to a standard definition TV, the one factor that defines them as a High Definition TV in the first place is the high def resolution. Millions of pixels come together in an HDTV to give the picture quality that is sharper and as realistic as is possible. Of course there are other factors that also determine the quality of picture display like contrast ratio, color accuracy and color saturation which are also very important. These properties combine with resolution to give the television screen a realistic display and true color reproduction.

Most HD television sets being sold in the market have fixed pixel displays that use a discrete set of pixels to produce an image that can be viewed through them. This is the case for both plasma HD TV and Full HD LCD TV. Prior to HD TVs a non fixed display was used to create images, this method was used in the direct view CRTs which are now extinct. Nowadays fixed pixels are used to develop displays. These displays have a native resolution which is the specification that explains the number of pixels the display is made up of. Typical native resolutions for HDTVs are 720p and then 1080p for the Full HDTV.

The major reason why these fixed pixel displays came about was to make the resolution dependant on the television set. This means that regardless of where the picture is coming from the display will convert it to fit the native resolution it has. This scaling is done for any source material like DVDs, VHS or HDTV broadcasts. Due to this feature, the television set will scale a high resolution video to lower resolution. However when it comes to a video that is a low resolution, it will not possible to make the image any sharper. To minimize the anomalies in picture it is better to switch the source resolution to a resolution that is native to the TVs. This will prevent any picture distortion that has been caused due to scaling.

All this boils down to one thing – while the television can show you a better quality picture in high definition, it will not sharpen a picture that is already bad quality and low resolution. But it will give true definition and display a high resolution picture as it was produced. In computer terms this can be referred to as the “Garbage in, Garbage Out” syndrome. When the display screen size is small the images produced by a HDTV and a Full HDTV are comparable in quality. They might not seem too different to the consumer’s eyes, the improvement in picture quality becomes more apparent when used for bigger screen sizes such as a 42 inch LCD Full HD TV.

There is another time when the resolution becomes useful. This is when you are using the HDTV screen as your computer interface. In this case, when the source is the computer, the screen resolution plays an active part and the amazing result is the high definition images are more clearly visible.