HD TV Jargon Buster

Let's start with HD and HDTV. HD stands for High Definition. Not surprisingly then HDTV means High Definition Television.

HDTV brings a revolutionary improvement in TV pictures quality. The clarity of HD pictures is around 4 times higher than conventional television. This improved clarity means that you can see far more detail, with richer life-like colours. In addition HDTV support the widescreen broadcast format for the home cinema enthusiast. Last but not least, HD includes a superior sound quality.

To take advantage of all this TV goodness, you will need the latest generation of equipment. This starts with an HD ready television or computer screen. However it doesn't end there. Cable or satellite receivers, media players, home cimema systems and the cables that connect them together need considering.

High Definition is sometimes shortened to "High Def", "Hi Def", "H D" or"HD" but these all refer to the same technology.

The HD ready logo is designed to show you that a product is ready to handle High Definition television pictures. This not only applies to televisions, but equally to other equipment like games consoles, satellite receivers ("Sky Boxes"), computer screens, disk players and hard drive video recorders.

HDMI stands for High Definition Multimedia Interface. This is a bit of a mouthful. Basically it is a standardised format for the cables and sockets that connect the different pieces of an HDTV system together. It is a replacement for the commonplace SCART connection that is currently in use, as SCART is not capable of handling the high quality HD picture format.

The Feed Source is the origin of what you are watching on the television. This could be say, a television programme broadcast by Sky, a film on disk, a game you are playing on a console, or a movie clip you downloaded to a PC.

Blu-ray has emerged as the clear winner of the format war with HD-DVD. Toshiba have announced that they are no longer going to manufacture HD-DVD format players. This means that Blu-ray is now the global standard for storing and distributing HD material like feature films for example. It is a high definition replacement for the current range of DVDs.

Widescreen means just that - a screen that is wider than normal TV. You'll probably have noticed that cinema screens are a lot wider than they are tall (see right, above), whereas standard televisions are much squarer (see left, above). As you can see from these examples, there is a big difference between the standard and widescreen formats. Standard TV is in the ratio of 4 wide 4 to 3 high, whereas widescreen is 16 wide to 9 high. Widescreen is also sometimes referred to as letterbox format.

Traditionally, nearly all television and video content was filmed in normal TV format whereas most movies were shot in something nearer the widescreen format. Television systems deal with this diifference either by stretching the picture to fit the screen, chopping off the edges (as in the example above) or by displaying a smaller picture on the screen and filling the gaps with black bars. Some televisions and disk players etc. allow you to decide how to display this content with a zoom feature.

HD television supports the 16:9 wide screen format and not only film makers, but also TV companies are producing content in the widescreen format now.