Glossary
10-bit processing and 10-bit display
Many of the displays have 8-bit display panels, which can reproduce the tonal ranges and colour transitions fairly average. 10-bit display processes an image 64 times more than an 8-bit display, which substantiate the performance aspects.
Terabyte
Many new hard drives will have their capacity measured in terabytes, or TB for short. A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes (GB), which in turn is a thousand megabytes (MB). A digital movie can easily be a gigabyte or more, and modern video games can use up to 20GB of space. It’s surprisingly easy to fill even a terabyte drive.
Text and digital text
With a set-top box or integrated digital TV, you can access the digital text services available on some digital channels. These look like internet pages, and some let you watch an inset of the TV picture at the same time.
Thunderbolt
Developed by Intel under the codename Lightpeak, it’s a futuristic way of allowing components to communicate with each other that’s designed to replace certain interfaces available today. Thunderbolt is different to, say, USB or PCI Express because it is built to work over copper wires or tiny fibre optical trails – and it’s very, very fast. Read Everything you need to know about Thunderbolt to find out more.
THX
When the original Star Wars movie was shown in cinemas, George Lucas was unhappy with its sound and picture quality. He set-up THX which specialises in high quality post-production work so that a film’s sound and picture standard is of the highest calibre. The name THX is derived from THX 1138, the first film Lucas made while he was a student in 1971. It starred Robert Duvall as a robot called THX 1138.
Time Slip
Lets you watch one recorded programme while recording another at the same time. Chase Play is an associated feature which lets you watch a recording that has already started while continuing to record.
Trojan
Like the Trojan horse, these are programs that are not what they seem. It might look like a harmless new screensaver that someone has emailed you, but chances are it secretly contains code that can harm your PC. They’re very similar to viruses, but require a human user to actively install them on a machine.
24p True Cinema
24p true cinema is a feature that helps to increase the smoothness and vividness of the images, as most of the movies are filmed at 24fps. 24P True Cinema helps to render the frames in sync with the original recording.
