What is High Definition, and do I need to get it?

High Definition (HD) means that any TV with the 'HD ready' logo on it can display one or both of these resolutions: 720 x 1280 pixels or 1080 x 1920 pixels (known as 720p, 1080i and 1080p) content. At the moment you can receive this either from a HD player, such as a Blu-Ray or HD DVD drives, which are mostly pre-recorded movies, or from Sky (satellite broadcast), which displays programmes and movies in HD.

In the future, HD (high definition) TVs will eventually be standard in all homes, along with digital broadcast signals (Freeview), and hopefully this will become HD too. Therefore in order to get the best out of your TV, you will need a HD television set that can view digital and HD content, or in other words 'be future proof'. HD TVs are not cheap, but the prices are coming down every week, and you have the added choice of what size screen you want to get, from a small 17 inch to a massive 50 inch screen!

What's with all of these types of resolutions, eg. 720p, 1080i and 1080p?

The 3 resolutions mentioned represent the 3 standard resolutions that nearly all HD TVs can accept from a HD source. I say nearly all, because 720p and 1080i are the most common resolutions that are usually displayed. 720p and 1080i are linked together, hand in hand, as 720p is an actual resolution of the screen, pixel for pixel, while 1080i is really a cheat mode, for gaining a seemingly highter resolution. It's really a trick on the eye, 1080i uses a technique called interlacing which displays alternate lines of the 1080p source image, eg. all odd lines at one time, then all even lines the next time, so on and so forth for each frame.

What do I need to get Hi-Def on my TV?

You need 3 things in order to get HD:
• A high definition TV, usually a LCD or Plasma screen - they're also very slim, in depth.
• HD inter-connector cables, namely HDMI (the best for image and audio) and/or Component Video (analogue signal, no audio, but very good image), or failing those, a DVI (digital signal, no audio) cable, which came with some of the 1st generation HD TVs, rarely supported these days.
• HD players or Sky or cable TV.

Why do I need new TV cables?

Composite video, SCART and RGB-SCART (European standard) only support the current 'standard definition' resolution that you currently get off a TV aerial and any DVD player, and is simply not good enough to support the HD signal from a HD player or Sky/Cable source.

So that leaves you with 2 main alternatives;
• Component cable, which is a 3 plug video cable (no sound carried) - analogue signal. You will need an extra set of audio cables for sound, which is usually the left/right audio ports next to the component video sockets.
• HDMI cable, which carries both HD images and surround sound audio - digital signal.

Out of those 2, HDMI is the best choice overall, as electrical signal interference is very minimal on these cables, and has the added benefit of carrying audio as well. With this in mind, you need to get a LCD or Plasma HD-TV with 2 or 3 HDMI ports on it, for plugging in multiple HD sources, ie. Playstation 3 or X-Box 360, HD player, and a Sky HD or Cable box.

How can I decide what TV to get, there's so many of them?

What I did, was to make a list of features that I wanted, and then that would narrow the number of TVs to choose from, lastly the final deciding factors would be price and style.
• The size of screen I wanted, eg. 37 inches.
• The type of HD-TV; LCD or Plasma screen.
• The TV's max picture resolution; 720p/1080i or 1080p.
• Does it have Digital TV reception (Freeview in UK).
• Is it a widescreen 16:9 screen aspect TV - most of them are.
• The number of HDMI ports on it - 2 or more is best.
• Other factors may also include the number of SCART or other types of sockets your video equipment needs to connect to the TV.
• How much are you willing to spend. If money is no object, and HD TVs can cost as much as a car, especially for very large screens, then move to the next factor.
• And lastly, do you like the look of the television - style is often everything, after all it's going to be sitting in your living room for a number of years.

What's the difference between a LCD and Plasma television?

LCD and Plasma differ in two ways, the technology used to show the image on screen and the size of the TVs. LCDs use very small points of Liquid Crystal Display elements to make up the image, and therefore LCD screens can be very small, usually starting from 15in right upto a large 42-43in screen. However LCDs don't go higher than this, probably due to costs of making such large screens. Meanwhile, Plasma screens use a plasma gas, with larger points or pixels to create it's screen image, this means that plasma TVs have to be larger in order to accommodate the sufficient number of pixels to create a HD image. Plasma TVs usually start at 42in and can go upto a collossal 60-100in screens, this often means they're more expensive! Which brings me to another difference, LCDs can display much higher native resolutions on their screens than plasma can, however you'lll only see this higher resolution on anything above 32 inches.

Another noticable difference between plasma and LCD is that the brightness and colour range of plasmas is very much larger than LCDs, usually 10,000:1 or more, compared with 2,000:1 for LCDs. This means that the number of subtle colour variations displayed is measured in billions on plasmas, therefore you won't get something called 'colour banding', where the difference between sutble colour gradations are quite noticable on most LCDs while plasma TVs do not suffer from this.

Also of note, is that LCDs don't produce deep blacks unlike plasmas, it is a common limitation for nearly all LCDs, especially if you're not looking directly square on to the LCD screen.

What's Freeview (digital television) all about, and how to get it?

In the UK we're gearing up to switch over from the old analogue television broadcasting signal, which is only 5 channels, to the new Freeview digital signal, where you can get 30 odd channels, all free. The digital signal is broadcast over nearly all of the UK, so you should be able to get it via your old TV aeral (I did). The only thing you do need is either a TV with an in-built digital tuner, which are on most new flat TVs these days, or buy a separate digital tuner set top box, to plug into your telly. For further information visit the Freeview web site.

Freeview logo, if you see this or more importantly the logo, your TV is Freeview ready.