Are more scan lines necessarily better?

Posted by Ergin Guney [IP: 206.181.95.130] on October 26, 1999 at 17:21:54
Using Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows NT):

In Reply to: Are more scan lines necessarily better? posted by Eylon Geva on October 26, 1999 at 12:36:29:

No NTSC-only TV set supports more than 480 scan lines. Those "700 lines of resolution" and "800 lines of resolution" type of claims you see in product literature refers to "lines of horizontal resolution"; not scan lines.

Scan lines are the lines that run horizontally across your TV screen. Those are the lines that the electron beam traces when forming the picture. When you count them from top to bottom, you find 480 of them. That never changes for any normal NTSC picture. It is fixed by the NTSC specification.

Lines of horizontal resolution is the measure of "the maximum number of *vertical* lines (alternating in black and white) that can be displayed on your screen from left to right before they all start to blur into one gray mass". That is an "analog" measure that (unlike the count of scan lines) can change based on the type of source that is used and from one TV to another.

Actually, even horizontal resolution is not that straightforward. Strictly speaking, horizontal resolution should be expressed in "how many vertical lines can fit into *one screen height's worth* of horizontal distance on the screen", rather than the full screen width. But manufacturers themselves rarely adhere to this rule and therefore those numbers are hardly ever reliable.

Follow Ups:

• Are more scan lines necessarily better? - Eylon Geva 18:09:54 10/26/99 (1)
  • Are more scan lines necessarily better? - Ergin Guney 10:55:54 10/27/99 (0)

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