What is High Definition

Comprehensive tech news and reviews from GetConnected. This video focuses on what is high definition really is.

Mike: A lot of people are interested in high definition, and you see that with the sales of flat screen TV’s. But what does high definition mean with all of these numbers all the time, 1080, 720, 480. Brent De Waal from Sony to help us understand or demystify it, once again, thanks for coming in to the show. Brent: No problem. Mike: Kind of confusing for a lot of consumers they go in to the electronic store and their kind of bombarded with all these numbers, you know, do they really need like a 1080 P-TV or 720. And I thought maybe we’d look at this chart that you brought here. I thought, you know, it will clearly illustrate, you know, how big the picture sizes are. Brent: Well I think one of the big problems is, just understanding what high def TV is. Because it has so many pieces you need a TV and you need a content to put in the TV, and then you got all the cables to hook it up. So we’ll start with the TV, and basically, this chart here shows us the relative resolutions, so the number of actual dots that are in your screen, this little box here is the TV we all grew up with. That’s how much resolution you can get on there. Mike: Which we thought was pretty cool. Brent: It was pretty cool and moving on, when we start to get high definition and this where the confusing part happens. This green box here is considered high definition, so it’s got 12 hundred and 80 pixels across and 720 down, and that’s what they call 720P, but anything between that and this what we often call Full HD, 1920 by 1080 is also considered full definition. So generally, people are picking, this resolution or this resolution, and all the other high deft components will make the picture fit. So in one sense, you’re being asked to make a decision, in the other sense when you hook it all up, the technology is making everything work. So with high def, a lot of times people will buy one piece of the puzzle, and they won’t upgrade the other parts. And so they’re not getting that full high def experience. So, we start at 720 or 1080 and then we start to look at what sources are going to put all those pixels on our screen. Mike: Well, let’s go to our sources here so, you know, we have DVD players which we all used right now, and that’s basically, you know, we think its great quality and it is, but it literally, it only still that small box here, 480 lines of resolution. Brent: And generally, when we hooked those up with used cables like this, this is a component cable, and so there’re six ends, we’re gonna put 3 on your DVD player and 3 on the TV, gonna get them all in the right place, and you’re gonna put in sounds and all these kinds of things. So the engineers came up with something called HDMI, which is this single cable, and this one cable, you plug it into the back, and, right here, and it has the audio and the video all with it. So you just plug this into the TV and you’re all hooked up. The final thing with hook ups is you’ll have other components you might have your Playstation, you might have your cable box, you might have other HD mice, and you might run out on your TV. Coz people usually don’t buy all these stuffs at once. They might have their older receiver, a newer TV, an older DVD player, and they’ll incrementally add to their systems. So one of the things when you find yourself with 2 or 3 HDMI sources, and only 2 plugs in the back of your TV, you might wanna go to a receiver, that has HDMI switching, and so this AV receivers allow you to actually take the signals and have 4 up to, we have a receiver that has 7 inputs into it. So, you can put anything you want and it’ll do all the switching again, it works with all the communications so you’ll plugging in many, fewer wires and having a much nicer experience. And when you have the right source, and it’s hooked up correctly, then you can spend your time enjoying the high definition TV instead of hooking it up and playing with it and getting on the back there. Mike: So obviously, 3 main things here, obviously, could have the right television, but beyond that you gotta have the right source, as well as the content whether that’s a blue ray player, a satellite or digital cable box, or an HD cable box, and of course the connection, you’re gonna make sure that you have the right cable on there, or it’s gonna, not work. Brent: Right. Mike: So where can people find more information about some of the stuffs that we’ve talked about here. Brent: We have information on our website for sonystyle.ca, which has all the sony information, but a lot of people, if they wanna really get in to it, wikepedia has some great articles, and wikepedia sort of hit and miss times. Prefer things like an HD mice specification or a high definition, specifications it’s a great place for people are going start to figure out what the technology is, starts easy and gets as complex as you want, and that might be a good resource as well. Mike: Great. Brent De Waal from Sony talking about HDTV, so hopefully that demystify a bit of it of r you in getting the right signal into your TV.