No, it’s not a bizarre reworking of the beloved Tom Selleck crime-busting show Magnum: P.I., though we at JuJuDeals certainly appreciate the heroic efforts of the fantastically mustachioed champion of justice. You may have noticed one of those two letters (”p” and “i”) following a set of numbers like “1080″ or “720″ on an HDTV you were eyeballing, and taking a cue from the brilliant, deductive mind of Magnum P.I., you just had to know what they mean.
Well wonder no more, detective.
In this case, the P’s and I’s we’re referring to stand not for “Private” and “Investigator,” but instead for “Progressive scan” and “Interlace.” Interlace was, until recently, the standard way to broadcast and view television images. See, unlike the flipbooks you used to make in elementary school by drawing in the corners of your textbooks, standard definition TV didn’t just show a series of complete, unadulterated frames in rapid succession. It used a method called “interlacing,” where it cut out every other row of pixels and replaced them with the rows that would have appeared in the next frame.
Imagine a set of horizontal window blinds with an image projected on them. Now imagine that behind the blinds was an accompanying image that would have followed the original in sequence. What interlacing did, essentially, was open the blinds halfway, slicing the two pictures so that you saw half of the first image and half of the second. This was to smooth the illusion of motion that TVs trick your brain into perceiving. It was a good idea, but you did lose quite a bit of image clarity.
Then came all these newfangled HDTVs and High Def computer monitors and what-have-you, which can show you things in Progressive scan mode. This is a lot more like the flipbooks you got sent to the principal’s office for making. Progressive scan TVs show you the complete, individual frames at high speeds. Pause the picture, and the image will be complete, perfect, and still, like looking out a window at someone else’s way more interesting and action-packed life.
Simply put, “i” is okay-but-outdated, and “p” is as true-to-life as we can make it…
For now.
