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technology<br />
74 d<br />
Def Wars<br />
Format war has been raging across Earth for years.<br />
While peace reigns in places, interplanetary council<br />
members Sony and the EBU are still fighting. What<br />
can be done to bring peace to the world of HDTV?<br />
A<br />
BY ED EWING<br />
lot’s written about HDTV, high definition television, but the New York Times tech<br />
correspondent got it in a nutshell: “On each programme,” he wrote upon receiving<br />
his HDTV set, “we counted the pores on the host’s nose.”<br />
An HDTV set has many more lines than a standard set, and the more lines you have, the<br />
better the picture. We don’t have it in the UK yet, but if you’ve been to the States, South Korea,<br />
Japan, Australia, Nigeria, or Brazil in the past few years you’ve probably seen it for yourself.<br />
Going from normal British telly to high definition TV is like going from black-&-white to colour.<br />
Your bog-standard TV set in the UK has 625 lines, of which you can only see 575. This is<br />
the PAL standard. A TV in the States has one hundred less at 525 and is known as the NTSC<br />
standard. High definition TV sets have up to 1,080 lines. This gives a much more detailed picture.<br />
After years of format wars across the globe, and in particular in the US, the HDTV world<br />
is settling down – a bit. The US has adopted a Common Image Format based on using the<br />
maximum number of lines, 1,080. But there is more to it than that.
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