Gadget of the Week
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Samsung UA55C9000 3D LCD TV
At $10,000, the Samsung UA55C9000 costs more than twice what an otherwise similarly specified, similarly sized, Samsung TV would sell for. So what’s so special about it? We reckon that several of the more extraordinary features justify that price.
Photo and Video
Standard definition vs high definition
First, let's spell out a few truths.
SDTV
Standard Definition TV. The video presented on the old, steam-driven telly has a screen ratio of 4:3. The screen definition was definitely below that delivered in the commercial cinema and consists of 576 lines running down the screen and 720 picture elements across the screen. In each second, 50 interlaced pictures are displayed, each made up from 288 lines - or half the complete picture - and known as '576i'.
HDTV
High Definition TV. The current state-of-the-art television picture has an aspect ratio of 16:9 (or 1.78:1), but is not as wide as movies, which are mostly 21:9 (or 2.35:1). This explains why Panavision-shot movies on DVD have letterbox masking at top and bottom of screen. The HDTV picture is also interlaced ('1080i') but these days most high-end LCD or plasma sets display the picture in progressive form ('1080p'), with 25 complete frames displayed each second. High-def home movies have four times the resolution of SD format.
When discussing high definition home movies we're talking about a picture with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, which is a perfect match for the screen resolution of most recent-model high definition LCD and plasma televisions TVs. There are so-called HDTV sets on the market with screen resolutions of 1366 x 768 pixels... but these actually can't display all the picture information captured by a high definition camcorder.
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The 16:9 high definition screen on the left is a generous picture, while the 'steam-driven' 4:3 in SD on the right is very much an image of the past.
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