Understanding HD, FHD, 4K, HDR, MEMC

Somethings are just hard to understand…like understanding women. But once you understand the basics, everything else becomes solid clear. Like compliments are for women, questions are for men. Emotions and logic.

It’s a complicated topic and for the sake of confusion, let’s not talk about that right now. Today let’s talk about your TV. It will just take a minute and a half to make you wiser than you are right now…ready to expand your knowledge?

Fine!

HD, FHD, 4K, HDR, MEMC

Hold on…it’s not that complicated, I promise!

Your TV screen is divided into small tiny square boxes invisible to the naked eye called pixels. HD, FHD, and 4K refer to the number of pixels. HD (High Definition) or 720p TVs has slightly over a million pixels, FHD (Full High Definition) 1080p TVs have slightly over 2 million pixels, while 4k (this mostly 50 Inches TVs) has over 8 million pixels. And the most modern and ridiculously expensive ones, 8K TVs (mostly 50 inches and above) has over 33 million pixels.

The more the pixels your screen has, the clearer the scenes look. However, it doesn’t always equate to better scenes, it does, but there’re other factors that determine the quality of pictures or scenes. That’s where HDR (High Dynamic Range) and MEMC (Motion Estimate, Motion Compression) comes in.

While 4K is about the resolution (number of pixels) HDR is about color range or color spectrum. HDR has a full spectrum (all the colors in the color spectrum) while HD might miss some colors. Thus, images displayed using HDR appears more real. dark colors appear darker and bright colors appear brighter without losing the crisp.

A good example is as below;

This happens due to the fact that a lot of details are lost when showing pictures and recording on a regular HD TV since it lacks some colors in the color spectrum. The missing colors in HD are available in HDR TVs hence the difference in picture quality.

The quality of pictures or scenes also depends on the number of frames per second. The higher the frame rate (frames per second) a display has, the higher the quality. This is where MEMC comes in. MEMC inserts more frames (extra frames) to the original number of frames, making the image clearer, smoother, and transitions livelier. For instance; an image with 47 frames exposed to MEMC becomes 90 frames per second, making it clearer and smoother.

So, next time you doing shopping for a new TV, you would know exactly what to look and what those numbers mean. Am not sure your friends know the difference.

Regards,

John