Beginner's guide to HDTV - 1 Why High Def?

So you keep hearing about HDTV. You might even have seen some high definition in a mate’s house or in one of the few HD equipped pubs that are around. But what is it and why would you want it? Well why not? In some parts of the gadget world, namely personal audio and video, quality has taken a back seat as convenience and functionality have taken over.

But this year TV took its biggest leap in picture quality since the arrival of colour back in the 1960s. High Definition TV offers images that are up to four times as detailed and have four times as many lines per picture as those offered by current TVs. It might not sound like too much of a leap but if you compare standard definition with high definition images you can't fail to be impressed. Besides HD is the way the world is going. In the US, which has had HD for nearly two years now, almost all the major programmes are filmed in HD. Here in the UK the BBC and Sky have both been shooting programmes in HD for several years too.

There's no denying that HD pictures are impressive but there is a whiff of a conspiracy theory or two about HD's arrival. Basically TV makers were no longer making money from their CRT sets which basically use the same technology that John Logie Baird patented back in the 30s. So they needed to move TVs on. They also needed sets that could handle images and video from non traditional AV sources like PCs. They also wanted to offer viewers sexy looking sets that had big screens and could be hung on walls. The problem for the makers though is that if you are watching standard definition pictures on a LCD or a Plasma screen the pictures look much worse than they do on similar sized CRT sets. This is due to the rather unforgiving nature of flat screen sets.

So to make the most of them the TV makers needed HD images. Meanwhile the broadcasters needed something to reignite consumer interest in TVs and both cable and satellite services began to see HD as a way of stealing a march over terrestrial (through your aerial) services. Movies studios also wanted to launch new home video formats as the price of DVD discs and players had fallen so low they were not making money on them. Finally games makers wanted to give consumers another reason to invest in their next generation consoles. Together all these factors have brought about the birth of HDTV.