Rob's Blog

My prediction until now was that HDTV, which has been available in the USA for years, would catch on in the UK as soon as HD DVDs became available. But now BSkyB has announced a HDTV service to be launched in 2006, so the race is on.

I recently saw a demo of HDTV in its 720P configuration that the new satellite service is likely to use. The 720 part means that there are 720 lines of resolution. This doesn’t sound much more than the 625 you get with regular analogue TV, but the P part means that it is progressive scan instead of interlaced, like a standard TV. Interlacing effectively halves the amount of picture information on the screen, and sure enough HDTV looks at least twice as good as standard definition. As long as you don’t sit too far from the screen you can pick out much more detail, and everything looks crisper and more real. It’s quite stunning to see, and well worth it. For once a technology that will give us a higher fidelity experience.

Like all new technology it will be expensive to start with; but perhaps not too much so. The Americans have already absorbed much of the early-adopter costs, and flat panel PC displays are getting cheaper all the time. So it may not be long at all before we all have HDTV in our living rooms.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 20th, 2004 at 9:19 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.