Knowing all these lines of resolutions and numbers of pixels can be an interesting intellectual exercise (if you simply gotta know all the stats of your HDTV), but you really need some sort of frame of reference to understand what’s good and what’s not.
We’ve already mentioned here that 720 vertical lines of resolution (or pixels) is the baseline requirement to reaching HDTV nirvana, but you probably want to know more details (otherwise, you’d have skipped this “techie” chapter, right?).
Table shows the most common types of TV signals, and the TV resolutions required to show them in full detail.
| TV Signal Type | Horizontal Resolution | Vertical Resolution | Pixels |
|---|---|---|---|
| NTSC (analog broadcast) | 330 | 480 | 158400 |
| NTSC(DVD) | 720 | 480 | 345600 |
| SDTV (480i) | 640 | 480 | 307200 |
| EDTV (480p) | 852 | 480 | 408960 |
| HDTV (720p) | 1280 | 720 | 921600 |
| HDTV (1080i) | 1920 | 1080 | 2073600 |
If you’re not familiar with the i and p suffixes in Table, we explain them in the following section, “Scanning and Interlacing.”
Vertical resolution gets all the attention, but horizontal resolution is important, too — it’s not like your eyes can’t see sideways as well as they can up and down, right? The whole HDTV industry, however, is a bit “looser” with horizontal resolution than it is with vertical — very few HDTVs can reproduce the full 1920 horizontal pixels/lines that 1080i HDTV signals can reproduce, so horizontal resolution is often de-emphasized in marketing materials and in articles about HDTV. You do want as much horizontal resolution as you can get, but you shouldn’t dismiss an HDTV just because it can’t reproduce 1920 horizontal lines of resolution.
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