Full HD

Various industry standards (see HD Ready and HD Tick) exist to give consumers an idea of what they are really getting for their money. Unfortunately, this hasn't stopped manufacturers jumping on the bandwagon and creating pseudo 'standards' of their own, accompanied by official looking logos.

What you need to understand is that the TV manufacturing market is driven by tough competition - while that's great for you, the consumer, it's eaten pretty heavily into margins for the manufacturers over the past few years. With the market basically segmenting into 720p (budget) HD TV's and 1080i or 1080p (premium) HD TV's, manufacturers needed a reason for you to pick the 1080 units - which are generally the physically bigger models, and carry a larger margin.

As consumers generally don't take easily to technical terms like 1080, Sony's marketing department kicked off the idea of the 'Full HD' moniker, and the other manufacturers soon followed suit with their own versions. What you need to understand is that 'Full HD' is a loose marketing term - there's no official standards body policing what it means, so be prepared to check the specifications closely.

Full HD logos. From left to right: Panasonic, Sony, Hitachi, JVC, Samsung. Note that some of them make explicit references to the screen resolution and progressive scan (1080p) features.

What it is

When you see a Full HD logo, what you can expect is a 1080i (minimum) screen resolution (that's 1,080 horizontal rows of pixels) Some TV's, displaying a Full HD logo have better specifications (e.g. 1080p), and these are usually denoted on the logo somewhere.

What it isn't

A Full HD logo specifies the TV's 'vertical resolution' (the number of horizontal rows of pixels) but gives you no guarantees about the 'horizontal resolution' (the number of vertical columns of pixels). 1080 TV's generally have a resolution of 1920x1080 (i.e. 2,073,600 pixels in total) but sometimes manufacturers turn out a cheaper TV with pixels that are wider than they are tall, in resolutions such as 1,440x1,080 (i.e. 1,555,200 pixels in total) - that's just 75% of the pixels.

To get around some of this confusion, some manufacturers specify the exact resolution of the particular TV in the attached logo. So remember, if you see a Full HD logo, do your homework before buying.