What does “lines of resolution” mean?
Everyone gets confused by the term “lines of horizontal resolution,” also known as LoHR or TVL. It’s a carryover from analog video, it’s poorly understood, and it’s inconsistently measured and reported by manufacturers, but we’re stuck with it until all video is digital and we can simply report resolution in pixels. Technically, lines of horizontal resolution refers to visually resolvable vertical lines per picture height. In other words, it’s measured by counting the number of vertical black and white lines that can be distinguished an area that is as wide as the picture is high. The idea is to make the measurement independent of the aspect ratio. Lines of horizontal resolution applies both to television displays and to signal formats such as that produced by a DVD player. Most TVs have ludicrously high numbers listed for their horizontal resolution. Since DVD has 720 horizontal pixels (on both NTSC and PAL discs), the horizontal resolution can be calculated by dividing 720 by 1.33 (f
Everyone gets confused by the term “lines of horizontal resolution,” also known as LoHR or TVL. It’s a carryover from analog video, it’s poorly understood, it’s inconsistently measured and reported by manufacturers, but we’re stuck with it until all video is digital and we can just report resolution in pixels. Technically, lines of horizontal resolution refers to visually resolvable vertical lines per picture height. In other words, it’s measured by counting the number of vertical black and white lines that can be distinguished an area that is as wide as the picture is high. The idea is to make the measurement independent of the aspect ratio. Lines of horizontal resolution applies both to television displays and to signal formats such as that produced by a DVD player. Most TVs have ludicrously high numbers listed for their horizontal resolution. Since DVD has 720 horizontal pixels (on both NTSC and PAL discs), the horizontal resolution can be calculated by dividing 720 by 1.33 (for a 4
