HDTV: What is 1080p Resolution?

If you are going to spent out thousands of dollars for a big high-definition television set, you probably want to get the best one available in your budget. In that case it is always good to have fair idea about the basic technologies of the product.

You must have seen different manufacturers claiming there HDTV as full HDTV and 1080p. But what does that mean?

1080P is the shorthand name for a category of video modes. Here 1080 represents 1080 lines of vertical resolution. Normally the ratio of Horizontal and vertical lines is 16:9, implying a horizontal (display) resolution of 1920 dots across and a frame resolution of 1920 × 1080 or about 2.07 million pixel.

And ‘P’ stands for progressive and means that each individual image that appears on the screen is created from top to bottom, much like a painter fills in a wall one stroke at a time. There could be another option here i.e. "i", refers to interlaced, which means every other line is painted--typically odd lines first--and then the process starts over again to fill in all the even lines.

Our conventional TVs have a resolution of 480i.

Now many HDTV manufacturng companies coming out different model of 1080p. But the quality of picture you are going to get in your HDTV not only depends upon the resolution, here a major factor is broadcasting. If you have source material, or content, that's created with 1080p resolution and display it on a screen that supports 1080p, the quality is absolutely stunning, with a level of detail that is more than twelve times higher than that of traditional standard definition TV.