Your door to the world of DVD ... where we don't talk over your head.
Picture Quality
What gives DVD the edge on having the best picture quality possible for the home video comsumer comes from several different plusses all added together.
First of all, the video is stored on the disc in the Component Video method versus the Composite Video method which is how Video Tapes and Laser Discs are recorded. What this means is more picture information is being stored, as the the picture information is split up for the red, green and blue, and not together like composite. This gives the picture a bigger dynamic range, allowing for blacker blacks and whiter whites and beautifully brilliant colours.
Second is the fact that the information is stored digitally instead of in an analog format, like Video Tapes and Laser Discs. With Digital Information everything is stored very precisely, which allows for perfect pausing and slo-motion playback. This however is not the case when the DVD is a copy of an analog source. When this is done, as can be seen with some of the lower end titles, the analog flaw as copied to the disc with the video, resulting in the disc unable be perfectly paused and appearing to have two overlapping images, this is known as interlaced video, and is common to analog recordings. A properly mastered disc would be non-interlaced allowing for perfect pausing and slo-motion playback. (You may notice some of the DVD NOW reviews referring to the disc's mastering as being off sync, interlaced video is what it is being referring to.)
Third is the Line Screen. An average television has a line screen of 240 lines high, and 320 lines wide. This is the resolution at which standard video cassettes are recorded at. DVDs however are recorded at twice the resolution, resulting in super sharp images that will quickly make your old video collection seem quite obsolete. On top of this, Widescreen DVDs can be recorded using the Anamorphic technique. What this involves is recording the image as a stretched full frame 480 line image, and then simply compressing the image to the correct proportions when it is viewed. This results in an even sharper image that is not to be found anywhere else in the home theatre market.
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