HD DVD Resolutions

Okay, so we’ve all been coaxed into thinking that standard DVD players are about as good as it gets in terms of picture quality. The truth is; they’re really not. Yes, they give us superior video playback, compared with VHS; but compared with HD TV, they lag way behind. In fact SD DVD resolution is only about half that of HD TV

But now that HD DVD has arrived, we can all see for ourselves just what we’ve been missing out on! When you invest in a High Definition DVD player, you’re going to get exactly what you pay for: superior resolution playback. To put it in perspective: SD DVD players offer anything between 480 and 580 lines of video resolution playback. HD DVD will double that!

When it comes to the numbers, HD DVD’s (including Blu-ray) are unassailable in the home entertainment market. True High Definition (THD) has always been the Holy Grail for DVD enthusiasts; at 1080 lines of vertical resolution per frame, that’s what HD DVD gives you. Movie makers like George Lucas shoot in 1080 because of the enhanced clarity it gives to big screen presentations.

So much for the vertical, what about the horizontal? The widescreen movie ration (16:9) is based on 1920 dots from end to end. So that gives us a total resolution of 1080 * 1920. To put it another way, it represents over two million pixels of information per single frame; bear in mind there are around thirty frames per second!

It gets better! High Definition screen shot resolutions are appended with the letter ‘p’ – for progressive scan – not the old interlaced system used by SD DVD players. Interlacing goes way back; it’s based on the requirements of our old cathode ray tube TV sets and it’s a clumsy way of refreshing our TV picture. Whereas interlacing refreshes the odd and even lines of data independently of each other, progressive scanning is sequential and therefore pretty seamless.

And that’s as good a way as any to sum up HD DVD resolution – it’s picture perfect, it’s seamless!