Hi! I’m Greg Harper the LiHD Answerman, and I get asked a lot of questions about television and where the other ones have come up all the time is “What’s this 480? 1080? IP? What does it all mean?”
Well, unfortunately it’s complicated. But let me see if I can solve it for you. 480i that is what we call standard television, that’s the television that has been around for years. It came back in the 30s and the “i” stands for interlace. Back in those days when they invented television, the television sets weren’t really that great. So all they could do was approximately 240 lines of screen, that in other words, a TV flickers made up of lines across the screen, and all that it can get in the screen at one time was 240. 240 weren’t enough so they came up with the scheme where they do 240 and half a field and 240 the other half of the field. What does fields mean, just say that each field, 2 fields makes a picture, each picture is framed and at the end of the day, the 480i had an interlace between the odd lines and the even lines, and it generated the picture that we’re all familiar with. That is the legacy, that’s the “i” interlace, “i” for interlace.
When DVD came along, they said “Well you know we don’t have that problem anymore, we don’t have these old TVs that have this problem. Maybe we can come up with a little bit better.” So they kept the same number of lines, but they made it progressive. In other words, every line was sent every time which get a higher resolution picture.
480i versus 40p. 40p is actually twice the resolution as 40i because i is only half the time the p means the other half, so, 40i standard resolution, 40p DVD resolution, a lot better but still not high definition. When HD came along, there was a big debate as to what would or should go. One camp said “Let’s keep the interlace because we’ve been doing it for years.” The other camp said “No, no. Let’s go progressive.” Unfortunately when HD was developed, progressive at the highest resolution really wasn’t possible. So, we had two big camps, one camp said “I think progressive is better.” So they went to 720p which is the time HD came out was the best we could do. The other group said “Let’s do 1080i.” which is like the old 480i, otherwise it’s only half the lines 540, but it’s higher resolution but only 540 lines at the time. So, you can argue whether 540 at the time vs. 720 at the time, but not have to switch them back and forth which one’s better. That’s almost a religious debate I won’t get into it. But 720p and 1080i are the two formats being broadcast today. Again, that’s went HD TV usability.
Now of course, HD technology has gone much further and we have something called 1080p. That’s more or less the Holy Grail. Nobody broadcasts 1080p so it’s only available right now on Blu-Ray players and on some satellite services are actually starting to offer 1080p. 1080p by the way only works with digital cables because it’s a much higher resolution signal requires a lot more information. You can only work with the HDMI cable. So, in order of all this, 480i that’s the standard television you are used to, 480p that’s the resolution that happened with DVD, 720p, 1080i, you can argue back and forth which one is better but both of those are standard HD resolution that you see on television today. 1080p that’s the Blu-Ray, that’s the newest resolution, that’s the highest quality, but you can only get that with a Blu-Ray player and a HDMI cable. Hope this didn’t confuse you too much and obviously if you have 1080p, it’s better than 720, but 720 and 1080 are still wonder performance.
If you want more information please go to LivinginHD.com and I’ll be happy to answer any other questions. Thanks.
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