Understanding Resolution

If you are looking into getting a new television, you have probably heard a great deal of talk about display resolution. You may be convinced that you have to get the best resolution possible for your television, but do you even know what resolution is and why it should matter to you?

In technical terms, the resolution of your television has to do with the number of pixels your television has in each of the dimensions that it displays. For this reason, looking at the numbers supplied by manufacturers can actually make it difficult to compare televisions accurately. In addition, the type of television you purchase will have an effect on the resolution, as the display resolution is different for cathode ray tubes, projection panels, and flat panels.

When it comes to plasma display panels (PDPs), digital light processing (DLP) projectors, and liquid crystal displays (LCDs), display resolution refers more specifically to the number of columns within the monitor and the rows of pixels used to create the display. This is why you will see two numbers when describing the display resolution, such as 800×600 or 1024×768.

This type of display resolution is referred to as a fixed-pixel-array. Although this can provide you with excellent resolution, a fixed-pixel-array results in a picture that is changed from the incoming format to the display format.

Of course, when it comes down to it, all of these numbers really don’t matter. What really matters is how the display looks to you when you look at it. In this case, there are several factors that can determine the resolution of the television. These include image resolution as well as optical resolution, which are affected by the shape of the display screen and the ratio of its width to its height. This is more formally called aspect ratio. The aspect ratio of each pixel is not necessarily the same as the aspect ratio of the actual screen, so both need to be considered when finding the television with the best image clarity.

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