Is it just me or does no-one really get it still in regards to what High Definition realy is?

OK, so maybe it is just me, but I could have swarn that there is a load of TV’s being advertised out there as HD that are not in fact, you know, HD.

I think that this all stems from the US market and their use of NTSC ( or Never The Same Colour ) as we used to call it in video production

NTSC is, in its native format, has a lower number of horizontal lines than the PAL format. (480 compared to 576) Because of this, in the US, basically anything with more than 486 lines became high res. ( in the eyes of retailers anyway )

When the cheap US specced LCD’s and Plasmas started to get dumped on Australia a few years ago, there were a plethora being advertised as ‘HD Ready’ or HD capable, when in fact all this meant was that they could accept an HD signal.

Of course they would convert this into their native format for the display, but all the consumer knew was that they bought an HD ready panel and they were feeding it an HD source, and by golly, there was a picture ont the screen, so it MUST be HD.

I think that there must have been multitudes of people that fell for this trap, and as the panels were reasonably cheap they probably lashed out at the HD ancilliary gear.

This will of course not endear all these people to HD as a format as it is light years away from the true 1080p (or 1080i for broadcast) format.

In January this year I purchased a 1080p widescreen LCD projector and set up a “Home Theater”.

A Sony Blu-Ray player was picked for my 1080p content provider and I have to say that full HD content in 1080p on a 2.2m wide screen is simply stunning, but I digress.

The real test is going to be what happens in the second hand market of LCD and Plasma panels and how people are going to go with advertising them for sale.

Which one is HD?