Difficult
I bought an HD television recently, and although I knew enough already to be able to buy the right thing, it became clear that the whole process of high-definition for your average consumer is far too complicated.
To begin with, the phrase "high-definition" is not a single thing, as there are three distinct types currently available, but all categorised with the HD-Ready sticker. Firstly there is 720p, meaning that the television is capable of displaying images which are 720 lines (or pixels) tall. Then there is 1080i, which means it’s capable of displaying 1080 pixel high images, but does so by first drawing 540 even lines, then the other 540 lines, and doing it so fast you probably can’t tell. And finally there’s 1080p, which is the same resolution, except it’s capable of drawing all the lines of the picture at once. Sky HD is 1080i (all broadcast HD is), so if you only have a 720p capable set, you’re not seeing all you can. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are 1080p, so it’s the same problem, you’re not really getting full HD if you’re only using 720p. But if you walked into a shop and were just looking for the HD-Ready sticker, how are you meant to know?
Then there’s standard broadcast television, what the BBC and ITV are pumping out on a daily basis, it runs at 480p (or thereabouts). It’s roughly a 640×480 image (well, NTSC is, PAL has more lines - but that’s a whole different conversation). If you’re buying a full 1080p HDTV, then that has a resolution of 1920×1080. That’s almost seven times the number of pixels on screen, you could get six full size standard definition streams on the screen at once, and still have space left over. But nobody wants to watch television as a tiny square in the corner of a larger screen so the set has to be capable of scaling up the standard content to fit the screen. That can be quite a process, and some sets manage it far better than others. And since the chances are you’re still going to be watching a fair amount of non-HD content, it can be a pretty important consideration.
There’s also the fact that blu-ray and HD-DVD’s only appear in their full 1080p resolution if you’re using an HDMI cable, which means you’ll probably have to learn something about the differences between each cable type, such as component or VGA, and how the SCART cables you’re used to are now fit for the bin. Or LCD versus Plasma technology, how Plasma can be better at blacks and fast moving images, but that LCD is lighter, less power-hungry and comes in higher resolutions. Even setting it up once you’ve got it, working your way through the 100 different options for colour and brightness and MPEG artefact compensation - you can be there for hours before you finally get it to perform as well as it possibly can.
There’s no doubt that HDTV is the future, but no product is ever really going to hit the mainstream when you have to be an AV-nerd just to make sure you don’t end up with an inferior setup.
