High Definition will save us all! Maybe.

Your dream television....
If money was no issue (which at the moment, it surely isn't), these would be the things to look for in a flat panel display:

1. Resolution of 1920x1080 - currently the best available and set to become the standard.
2. Progressive scan - twice as good as interlaced.
3. A high contrast ratio - anything above 20,000:1 will give good results. 1,000,000:1 is now not uncommon.
4. A high refresh rate - 60hz is good, but we are now seeing up to 120hz.
5. Lots of inputs - You want to be able to plug everything in don't you? 3+ HDMI ports plus PC and composite inputs. USB ports are also good for viewing photos.
6. It looks nice

What to look for in a Blu-ray player....
A short list, but two essential things to have in a Blu-ray player if you don't want it to become obsolete within 6 months:

1. Ethernet port - essential if you want to be able to update the firmware on the player (which you do, trust me)
2. Blu-ray profile 2.0 - there is also 1.0 and 1.1, both of which are not guaranteed to play BD-Live bonus material.

Follow these links to read the latest reviews and check out the top rated plasma, LCD and Blu-ray players.

The absolute king of the HD jungle is the mighty all conquering 1080p. This is also known as Full HD, True HD or Ultra HD and is the highest resolution, best looking of all the HD types. The 1080 refers to the number of lines capable of being displayed (the resolution) and the 'p' refers to the term progressive scan (the other option is interlaced or 'i' for short), which denotes the order in which the lines are displayed.

So these are the two main points to look for:

Resolution - If you look really closely at your TV or your computer monitor, you can see lots and lots of little squares, called pixels. The more pixels there are, the higher the screens resolution will be. For example, when somebody says they have a screen with a resolution that is 1080, that means that one line of pixels from the top to the bottom of the screen would contain, you guessed it, 1080 pixels. Often you will see it as 1920x1080 which simply means it has 1920 pixels that run in the horizontal lines and the 1080 pixels that run vertically.

Scanning - This is the way that the lines of pixels are processed. If it is progressively scanned, then each horizontal line is refreshed one after the other, from top to bottom which is the ideal way to do things. Interlacing on the other hand, refreshes the odd numbered lines first followed then by the even numbered lines. So lines 1, 3, 5 ,7 ,9 etc are refreshed and when the last odd numbered line is done, it moves on to refreshing 2,4,6,8 and so on. This can create a jagged effect especially when watching fast moving sports or action sequences.

So 1920x1080 is the highest resolution available and progressive scanning is superior to interlacing, which brings us to the conclusion that 1080p really is the King!

This is also a very important point to consider and is simply the measured ratio between a displays brightest color (white) and its darkest color (black). It is important to have a high contrast ratio otherwise blacks, brows and grays may blend in together and appear as one indistinguishable mess.

Due to the two different technologies being employed, a plasma screen will generally be able to produce a higher contrast ratio than an LCD. This is because the gas cell structure within a plasma screen allows for almost no leakage of light between the individual pixels whereas in an LCD screen, which has a backlight that shines the light through a sheet of liquid crystals, there is a much greater chance of light coming through when it is not supposed to.

So in the race for the highest contrast ratio the plasma screen is usually going to win, although with technology always moving forward the way it does, the LCD screen is catching up in this department.

It's all very well to have your new shiny Full HD plasma or LCD screen that progressively scans and has the 1920x1080 resolution, but to get the most out of you display you want to be watching something that has been recorded in full high definition.

Upscaling
The new Blu-Ray players are currently the only devices that will output 1080p. All high definition TV channels are only output at 1080i or 720p, meaning that processors within the TV itself will 'upscale' the 1080i/720p images it is receiving, and turn them into 1080p but this will result in a small loss of picture quality due to the fact that the television will have 'make up' the extra pixels to completely fill the screen.

The exaggerated effects of upscaling

Downscaling
On the other side of the coin, if you have a screen that has a resolution of say 720p(1280x720 pixels) and you are playing a Blu-Ray disc and sending the screen a 1080p resolution, the screen will 'downscale' the images to the 720 resolution, again resulting in loss of picture quality due to the processor in the television removing some of the pixels so that the image can fit within the smaller resolution.

The exaggerated effects of downscaling

So at this stage in the HD game, the only way to truly watch Full 1080p High Definition is to have a Blu-Ray player that will output 1080p, and a screen or a projector that will display 1080p.

Blu-ray, also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD), is the next step up from the standard DVD's that we all know and love. Remember the old VHS tapes that DVD's replaced? Well Blu-ray is set to do the same to the DVD.

Blu-ray discs look much the same as a DVD, with the main difference being that a Blu-ray player uses a blue laser to read the information on the disc whereas a DVD uses a red laser. Without going into the physics and the science of it all, a blue laser can be more precisely focused which allows for the data to be more tightly packed, so then more data can fit onto the disc. More than five times the data in fact, with a dual layer disc capable of holding 50GB, which has made it possible to record and playback High Definition video. And recent developments by Pioneer has pushed the storage capacity to 500GB on a single disc by using 20 layers which is quite astounding.

HDMI stands for High Definition Multimedia Interface and is a way of transferring audio and video signals from say a Blu-ray player to a Plasma or LCD screen using only one cable.
HDMI supports every video format there is (including of course 1080p) and up to eight channels of audio. There is obviously a lot of science and tech mumbo jumbo associated with how it works, and the various protocols that the format abides by, but there really is only one point that we need to understand with HDMI - it will work with any format. It just works!

So if you have a plasma, LCD or projector with a HDMI port and your source (DVD player, Blu-ray player, set top box etc.) has a HDMI port, then all that is required is one
HDMI cable to connect the two together and you can begin enjoying whatever it is you enjoy watching. And you can eliminate that mess of cables behind the TV!

There is just a couple of things to watch out for with HDMI:

1- There is a cable designed specifically for portable devices that use a smaller connector. The cable is called a HDMI Type-A-to-Type-C connector cable.

2- You should buy the shortest possible cable length that will work for your particular setup, as very long runs of cable can sometimes weaken the signals that are traveling through it and cause instability.