What is the difference between Full HD and HD Ready displays?
High definition TV offers a variety of formats that improve upon the quality offered by standard definition TV (PAL or NTSC). HD Picture quality is measured by the number of lines a screen has, for example 720p offers 720 horizontal lines, while 1080p offers 1080 lines - by comparison standard definition only gives 576 lines. This extra viewing space allows for far more detail in the picture, and as you can well imagine, the more detail the better the experience will be: while a 720p display will offer around twice the detail or resolution of a standard display, a 'full HD' 1080p display can offer up to five times the detail.
The very best quality picture is offered by 1080p content - offering a full 1920 x 1080 resolution picture in every frame, closely followed by 1080i, which offers the same resolution but in an 'interlaced' format - this means one frame contains half the picture and the following frame contains the other, in odd and even lines.
An 'HD Ready' display will usually mean a display that 'natively' offers a 720 line screen - so the actual physical number of horizontal lines on the screen is 720. Higher quality images are supported, but only when 'downscaled' - converted digitally to remove the extra lines and fit the picture on the screen. This obviously leads to a lower quality picture compared to a 'Full HD' display - but the quality will still be a major improvement over standard definition, with twice the definition.
It is also worth bearing in mind that content producers - television studios, film companies and games writers - can choose the definition in which they want to create their film, game or tv show, and broadcasters may choose to broadcast some content at a lower quality such as 1080i or 720p in order to save resources, so you may not always experience a difference.
However content with fast moving images such as action films, computer games and sports programming will usually be broadcast at the highest definition possible, so it is a matter of personal choice as to whether 'HD Ready' is worth the savings it offers.
