resolution on tv

[jerseycop]

What allows certain tv's to be limitied in their resolutions?...what i mean is, are they limited because of their video cards?.. i would think that would be what makes the difference between hd,ed, regular tv...just curious, if this could be changed?..could my edtv be upgraded to a hdtv?.now im not saying rip open the plasma and mess around, but if someone who fixes them for a living, could it be done?

[mjones73]

TV's don't have video cards like computers. Your plasma is a fixed pixel display meaning it has a set physical number of individual pixels available, you can't just add more to increase it's native resolution.

[57U]

As mjones73 indicated for fixed pixel displays like plasma, DLP, LCD, LCoS, the number of pixels is fixed (hence the name).

For CRTs, it's how fast they can turn the beam that "draws" the picture on and off (horizontal resolution), as well as how many vertical lines it can draw (vertical resolution). Most SDTVs cannot do it as fast and don't have as many lines vertically, therefore they have less overall resolution, although some good Direct View SDTVs do have pretty good horizontal resolution (which doesn't matter much because the NTSC signal they receive doesn't provide that amount of resolution.

The only way to test a CRT's horizontal resolution is with a test pattern (generator). Consumer CRT-based HDTVs are ALL 1080i (vertical).