Televisions used to come with numbers that indicated the size of the screen. Nowadays there’s the screen size to consider, but with LCD and HDTV there is also a number that indicates screen resolution.
Understanding the screen resolution number on an lcd tv is actually quite simple. First there is a number, such as 720 or 1080 that indicates the actual screen resolution. Then there is a letter, either an “i” or a “p” that designates the HDTV source.
When it comes to screen resolution, the higher the number, the better the picture. All LCD televisions used fixed pixel displays . This means that pixels are arranged in a grid and the more pixels involved, the sharper the picture will be. A 1080 number usually means that the actual pixel grid is 1920 horizontal pixels by 1080 vertical pixels. Multiply the two numbers and the actual display is over two million pixels of resolution. A true 720 resolution will be 1280×720 pixels, though the number “720″ is also used to refer to 1366×768 and even 1024×768 pixels.
The HDTV source resolution refers to the way the images are created in a given television. Interlaced scan technology , the “i” designation, offers a display rate of 25-30 frames per second. Progressive scan technology (“p”), in use in pretty much all LCD TVs, has a display rate of 50-60 frames per second.
Most LCD TVs will upscale or downscale to match the content being delivered to the system to match the display resolution. Some LCD TVs come with a 1:1 pixel mapping feature. This will display all content at its original resolution, without the minor flaws introduced by upscaling or downscaling.
