Welcome to the world of high definition, Blu-ray, 1080p, and HDMI. With the increasing popularity of Blu-ray these buzzwords are thrown all over the place, and honestly it’s pretty confusing. Don’t worry, Your Brain On Tech is here to help! Get ready for your crash course in high definition television.

HDTV

First up, what’s so different from my old TV or computer monitor to my new HD model? One word: pixels. In Layman’s terms, there are now more dots on your screen making up the same images that were there before, giving you better clarity and making it more obvious when your picture quality is lacking.

Blu-ray

Blu-ray is the cornerstone of the HD world. If you own an HDTV and you don’t have a Blu-ray player, get one.  It’s not a necessity, but you are missing out on so much! Not only does a Blu-ray player play 1080p Blu-ray movies, it also makes your old DVDs look better than they did on your old DVD player through a process called upscaling. How cool is that? DVDs won’t look as good as Blu-ray, but they will still look better than watching a DVD on a traditional player.

Just numbers and letters?

What is 1080p you ask? 1080p stands for 1,080 horizontal rows of pixels refreshed progressively. You don’t need to worry about what it means too much, however, what it means for you is the full HD experience and unbelievable picture quality. At this point, steer clear of HDTV’s that are not 1080p. If you do, 5 years from now you’re going to wonder why you didn’t buy a 1080p-enabled HDTV and it’s going to drive you crazy. 720p can be called HD, but it’s about two-thirds the resolution of 1080p, so save up a bit more and get a 1080p TV.

Another common HD format is 1080i, which stands for 1,080 horizontal rows of pixels refreshed in an interlaced fashion. If you’re really interested in understanding video formats, a Google search should net you the answer — but as a consumer — all you really need to know is that 1080i and 720p don’t produce the extremely high image quality that 1080p does.

You may be thinking, “Gee, that sounds great, but I don’t have a bunch of money to put down for a Blu-ray player just so my movies look cooler.” As a poor college student, I fully understand the feeling. The good news is Blu-ray players have significantly decreased in price. Blu-ray players now sell as cheap as $150 depending on the feature set and many Blu-ray movies are within $5 of their DVD counterparts. I can tell you from personal experience you can get a good Blu-Ray player for $300 or less without having to sacrifice quality.

HDMI

Moving on to HDMI, it’s pretty darn cool. HDMI stands for High-Definition Multimedia Interface; in short it carries digital video and audio in one cable. HDMI replaces your composite (red, white, and yellow) audio/video or component (green, blue, red) video cables from your VCR, DVD player, video game systems, etc. Not only will HDMI improve your video quality but it will also consolidate audio and video cables into one.

Something this cool has to be expensive too right? Yes and no. It does, if you buy them from a store, and it doesn’t if you are smart and purchase them from the Internet. This is the real reason I wanted to write this article because I purchased a 6ft HDMI cable for under $10 online. Major retailers are selling and advertising HDMI cables starting at $30 and going upwards to $100. Please, if you get one thing from this it is: do not buy your cables and accessories from over-priced retail stores, shop online! The nature of the technology behind HDMI is that it either works, or it doesn’t, there is no grey area. Do not think if you pay more you will get more.

Now you are prepared for the world of HD and assuming we all don’t kick the bucket in 2012, you should be up-to-date with your home entertainment equipment until 2020 or so. The only part of we haven’t yet touched on is differentiation between LED, LCD, and Plasma TVs. It’ll be a topic of discussion later, so check back!

1080p, audio, blu-ray, hdmi, hdtv, high definition, video