Have you ever wondered how that Philips HDTV in your bedroom produces high-quality pictures? Of course, it's a question of resolution. Compared to the ordinary televisions, HDTVs are used for premium programming when picture quality is of utmost priority, and bandwidth is less of a concern. These include select prime time shows,
major sporting events, and premium movies.
If you look closely, the pixels in an HDTV can reach up to 2,116,800! This is six times higher in picture detail than standard definition television which only has 307,200 pixels.
Color resolution is also increased by a factor of two.
High Definition Television also uses a data rate of 25-27 Mbps for the best possible picture. All of the HDTV formats use MPEG-2 as the video compression standard, just like DVD-Video. If you're wondering what MPEG-2 is, basically it is a flexible video encoding algorithm which scales up nicely for the higher resolutions of DTV. Finally, the best thing about HDTVs is that there are no analog transmission artifacts and degradations such as snow due to
weak signal, double images or ghosting due to multi-path interference of large buildings and structures, and sparkles due to noise from a vacuum cleaner.
