TV Pixel Growth

It sounds like a terrible disease.
TV Pixel Growth. Hope I don't
get it.

TV pixel growth is the growing
number of pixels found on your TV
screen. The more pixels, the better
the visual resolution of the TV.

It's an over-simplification, but pixels
are really details. The more pixels
you have (and the better the quality of
the pixels), the more detail you can see
on your TV screen.

Quantitatively, pixels are measured by
how many you have. Qualitatively, pixels
are measured by things like contrast ratios.

One thing you can be sure of in life. The
more quantitative something is, the easier it
is to measure. The more qualitative something
is, the harder it is to measure.

For example, it is very easy to measure how tall
you are or how much you weight. Quantity is easy!
What's much harder to measure is whether or not
you are a good person. Also, it can be hard to
measure how good you are at something. Quality
is much harder to measure than quantity.

So it is with TV pixels. It is much easier to
measure how many pixels you have on your TV than
it is to measure whether the pixels are any good
or not.

Pixels have been growing. The TV sets we had
for the first 50 years of television's existence
had 480 lines in the United States. Those 480
lines are roughly equivalent to 480 vertical
pixels.

Think of old old TVs as being 480p. Modern
digital TVs are either 720p or 1080p. Pixels
have been growing.

The rate of pixel growth per generation of TV
technology seems to be 50 percent. 720p is
50 percent more vertical lines than 480p.
1080p is 50 percent more vertical lines than
720p.

There has been a rather fascinating change that
has taken place in the last ten years. Whereas
the first generation TVs stayed stuck at 480p
for 50 years or so, the last 10 years have seen
us go through 2 more generations of television
visual resolution.

720p and 1080p have come one behind the other
rather quickly.

I could be wrong but I suspect that we may plateau
at 1080p for quite some time. The reason I think
this, and I admit it is not all that great a reason,
is that it will take quite some time for content to
be available that exceeds 1080p.

The reason why I could be very very wrong about this
is that historically, software has always lagged behind
hardware. However, as computer hardware becomes available,
people always seem to find a use for it.

Your TV is hardware. The content that you watch on TV
is in some sense software. If televisions become available
that have a greater resolution that 1080p, will people buy
them? Probably. You can always find someone who is willing
to spend money on the latest and the greatest.

If enough TVs are out there that can handle content greater
than 1080p, then someone will probably produce content
greater than 1080p.

It's a funny thought, but the first market for greater than
1080p could be home movies. If you can afford a TV that
can deliver greater than 1080p, why not buy a video camera
that can do the same?

In the case of home movies, both production and distribution
are done in house. Therefore the whole end-to-end operation
is an in-house operation.

While I do expect the world to plateau a while at 1080p, I
can't help but think that home movies will someday take us
beyond 1080p.

The more things change, the more things stay the same. There's
always someone out there that is pushing us all to take the
next step.

Ed Abbott