Who wants to go shopping for something that they really don't know anything about? Or who wants to feel at the mercy of a salesperson who rattles on with all the technical terms that sound like a language from another planet? It's no wonder that lots of people feel intimidated by shopping for electronics products and especially is that true of television sets.



Let's start with HDTV. You hear about it all the time now, but just what is it? The simple version is that it stands for High Definition TV, and it is a quantum leap in the way that television will be viewed in the future. It basically means that the television signal is so dense with information on both the video and audio side that the picture will be incredibly sharp and smooth, and the sound is so good that it can actually rival that of movie theaters.

On the video side, you need to understand the pixel to fully appreciate the improvement in screen resolution. The televison screen, just like your computer screen is made of up of lots of small squares that have a part of the information that makes up the whole picture. The more pixels on a screen the more information about that picture and therefore the sharper the image will appear.

Older analog TV screens often had about 480 lines of pixels in it. HDTV can display up to 1080 lines instead, each with 1920 pixels, totalling up to a whopping two million+ pixels on the screen as opposed to only 200,000 on the older analog screen. That is ten times the information being displayed, and can give you an idea of how much sharper the picture will be.

But the sound is much improved as well. The HDTV standard allows for audio to be transmitted in Dolby 5.1 surround sound, which is similar to the technology used in movie theaters these days. This kind of sound puts you right in the middle of the action and is more faithful to the way the sound was originally mixed for that program.

Widescreen is another part of the HDTV experience that you will hear about, and that refers to the ratio aspect of the screen. An HDTV set has a 16:9 ratio, in other words for every 16 inches wide the screen is also 9 inches tall. That aspect ratio more closely resembles movie theater formats and so when viewing movies you get to see all the action without losing anything on the screen.

There is more to know about this new technology but if you understand what we have discussed in this article it will help you have more confidence in shopping for televisions in the future.