With the rapid rollout of LCD tv’s, I thought we’d catchup on the simple information about HD, 1080p, Blu Ray and all that Jazz.

Back in the 90’s, our early early computers had screen resolutions of 640×480, that literally meant that there was 640 vertical lines(left to right) and 480 horizontal lines (top to bottom) displaying the image our eyes could see.In those days we never discussed how many lines a TV had because those TV’s were analog, light shining on glass that was rarely measured and never discussed, the resolution at a rough estimation of these TV’s was 320×240, about half of what Computer monitors were displaying, which is why, when you plugged the video output from a pc into a TV it looked blurry and enlarged, because the stadard TV couldn’t display the text and images at a sharp enough resolution.

Computer monitors started accelerating their resolution improvements and quickly jumped to 800×600 and then 1024×768, TV screens followed suit, and the better CRT models got their resolution up to 640480 too, this is what is called (Standard Definition, this didn’t occur in any major sense until 2005, when Plasma screens were already well entrenched (despite their price tags in the low teen thousands) and LCD Tv’s were beginning to gain raction in the consumer market place.

Today, 1080p indicates that a screen can display 1920×1080 resolution and comes standard on 40 inchand 52 inch tv’s, (I like the Samsungs best), 720P is about normal for the 30 and 32 inch models, but, how do Macs stack up against these impressive figures, and, can a Mac show you a picture much better than these TV’s?

Judge for yourself: 20 inch iMac: Resolution: 1680-by-1050 

24 inch iMac Resolution: 1920-by-1200 

 So, before you choose to watch all the upcoming HD movies, like 

Wall.E , Indiana Jones, Journey to the Center of the Earth or the Mummy 3, be sure to carefully pick out what’ll serve you best.