Samsung News Geek

If you're a technophile, all the numbers and specifications related to HDTVs probably have you in heaven. If you're just wanting a good TV, on the other hand, they may have your head spinning. Hopefully this will help:

HDTV 1080p vs 720p. The number stands for how many lines are used to make up the picture. The "p" stands for progressive. No, that's not a political statement. It simply means that TVs with progressive scanning process the lines into images faster than TVs with interlaced scanning. There's a lot of debate about what's best. Short version: 720p is fine for TVs that are 40" or smaller. 1080p is somewhat better for bigger TVs and watching Blu-Rays.

HDTV 120hz vs 60hz. "Hz" stands for hertz, which in TV-land means how many frames per second the TV displays. This is important to TV viewers in the sense that a slower frame rate can give a blurred or choppy effect to the picture as you're watching it. Live TV is shot at a different frame rate than movies and scripted TV. If you have an LCD or LED TV, it has to convert these frame rates into a format it can display. Sometimes that conversion causes a blur. Short version: 120hz is better for displaying movies and scripted TV shows; 60hz is okay for live action but might get a bit blurry during action scenes.

HDTV 120hz vs 240hz. This is the same issue as above. However, many people can't actually see a difference between 120hz and 240hz when watching TV. Short version: 240hz isn't that much better than 120hz.

HDTV 600hz. You'd think 600hz would be ten times better than 60hz, wouldn't you? However, there's a catch. You only see 600hz on plasma TVs. Remember how I said that hertz were basically about motion blur? Plasma TVs don't have a problem with motion blur. Short version: 600hz sounds good but probably won't make the slightest difference to your viewing pleasure.

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Pictures on this page come, respectively, from the following sources:
1st Image courtesy of Danilo Rizzuti / 2nd Image courtesy of Ambro / 3rd Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / 4th Image courtesy of imagerymajestic / FreeDigitalPhotos.net