High Definition Television

High-definition television (HDTV) is a television system providing an image resolution that is substantially higher than that of standard-definition television.

HDTV may be transmitted in various formats:

The letter "p" here stands for progressive scan, while "i" indicates interlaced.

When transmitted at two megapixels per frame, HDTV provides about five times as many pixels as SD (standard-definition television). HDTV provides a more desirable picture because of the increased amount of pixels, allowing images to be changed up to 60 times per second compared to SD at 30 times per second. This produces a clearer picture due to progressive scanning.

The term high definition once described a series of television systems originating from August 1936; however, these systems were only high definition when compared to earlier systems that were based on mechanical systems with as few as 30 lines of resolution. The ongoing competition between companies and nations to create true "HDTV" spanned the entire 20th century, as each new system became more HD than the last. In the beginning of the 21st century, this race has continued with 4k, 5k and current 8K systems.

The British high-definition TV service started trials in August 1936 and a regular service on 2 November 1936 using both, the (mechanical) Baird 240 line sequential scan (later to be inaccurately rechristened 'progressive') and the (electronic) Marconi-EMI 405 line interlaced systems. The Baird system was discontinued in February 1937. In 1938 France followed with their own 441-line system, variants of which were also used by a number of other countries. The US NTSC 525-line system joined in 1941. In 1949 France introduced an even higher-resolution standard at 819 lines, a system that should have been high definition even by today's standards, but was monochrome only and the technical limitations of the time prevented it from achieving the definition of which it should have been capable. All of these systems used interlacing and a 4:3 aspect ratio except the 240-line system which was progressive (actually described at the time by the technically correct term "sequential") and the 405-line system which started as 5:4 and later changed to 4:3. The 405-line system adopted the (at that time) revolutionary idea of interlaced scanning to overcome the flicker problem of the 240-line with its 25 Hz frame rate. The 240-line system could have doubled its frame rate but this would have meant that the transmitted signal would have doubled in bandwidth, an unacceptable option as the video baseband bandwidth was required to be not more than 3 MHz.

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