Hyper Real: HDTV

It sounds like a futuristic riddle: flat screen not box; LCD or plasma, not CRT; 3D not 2D; HD not SD. What am I? Today’s TV. For all the answers you seek, read on.

These days if we walk into someone’s place and see a CRT sitting on their TV cabinet, we do a bit of a double-take. High definition plasma and LCD screens have been slowly creeping their way into our lives for the past few years, and now a large flat screen that can be mounted on the wall has become the staple of any good home entertainment system. If you’re looking to invest in an HDTV, we can help you bring home something that’ll suit your needs.

HDTV

An HDTV displays images in two resolutions, either 720p or 1080p. That means there are either 720 or 1,080 pixels in a vertical line across the screen. Any signal that differs from these resolutions is either downscaled or upscaled. The more pixels shoved onto a screen, the more precise and clear the picture. Full high definition is 1080p, but 720p is still significantly clearer than a standard definition TV. New shows are almost always shot in high definition, but you need to have an HDTV in order to reap the benefits.

The cool thing about high definition is that it allows you to get huge TVs for that home cinema feel while retaining excellent picture quality. And you won’t get a significant amount of the picture cut off at the sides if it was filmed in a different ratio, which makes for an all-around better viewing experience.

When television makers introduced HDTVs, it was inevitable that they would come up with a way to render the technology obsolete not long after everyone bought a set. And they have. The next wave in home viewing is 3DTV – a 2D picture that includes some stereoscopic depth.

3D TV

As 3D filmmaking and film-projection technology have improved, Hollywood has begun building a library of depth-enhanced movies.

The potential to synthesise 2D movies into 3D could feed demand, just as colourising technology increased some people’s interest in black-and-white films in the 1980s.

3D at home relies on alternating between left and right views in successive frames. HDTVs that operate at 100Hz (that is, 100 refresh cycles per second) alternate left and right eye images far faster than the human eye can follow, creating the illusion of 3D.

Viewing 3DTV displays requires ‘active’ glasses that use rapidly firing shutters to alternate the view from each eye, but designers are beginning to produce 3D sets that don’t require glasses. Toshiba recently showed off its no-glasses 3D prototypes at CEATEC, but there’s no word on what those might sell for outside of Japan.

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