HD Ready And Full HD Explained

Do you know the Difference between HD Ready and Full HD?

So the time has come for you to upgrade your television, understanding the difference between HD ready and full HD is crucial. With all the options available to the consumer it is easy to get lost in the wealth of marketing spiel and geeky techno terms.

So what is the difference between HD ready and full HD?

The construction of a flat panel television is such that the picture is made of lines of dots. It is these dots that are referred to as pixels. Looking at an LCD television which has a resolution of 1366 x 768 for example, it simply means that the there are 1366 dot across the width of the television screen and 768 from top to bottom. Multiplying these numbers together gives the total number of dots on the screen of the televisions which happens to be 1049088. This is just over 1 million pixels that make up the entire television screen.

HD ready and full HD is not always black and white. On a full HD LCD television the resolution might be 1920 x 1080; when these figures are multiplied together it gives a total number of pixels of 2073600 or just over two million pixels.

So with twice as many pixels as a standard HD, HD ready and full HD should always be a better picture right?

This is where people can get confused as the picture quality depends on what the program is that you are watching. In the event that you are watching a program broadcast in standard resolution, the quality of the broadcast is such that the dots on a full HD television will never be completely filled. In this scenario, the television has to work to fill the dots. As a result of this, it often leads to a fuzzy looking picture when you are within a certain distance of the screen. This distortion is often referred to a ‘pixilation’ and occurs on most HD ready and full HD televisions. The greater the number of dots there are on the screen, the harder the television must work to fill those dots. Due to this fact, if you are watching a standard broadcast on a cheaper standard HD ready television, the resulting picture will be better than a full HD television. HD ready and full HD broadcasting is well established with Sky broadcasting many channels that will blow you away with their picture quality. All sky do to provide HD ready and full HD programs is provide more pixels in the broadcast so that the picture fills the screen on the entire television.

So what is the best way forward when looking at televisions to buy, HD ready and full HD? Well if you are planning on getting HD television broadcast you should opt for HD ready, if however you have already got a HD broadcast, go for full HD and always watch in HD to get the best from your television.