The quality of the picture that you get from top HDTV Plasma TVs is partly due to its resolution factor. With a million or more pixels, the best HDTV Plasma TV creates images which are much sharper than any other TV, and appears to be more realistic to the eye. You can even see a three dimensional effect of a bead of sweat rolling down a man's forehead. Though resolution is not the end word for a better picture quality, it does have a greater contribution in producing the pictures that you get to view in top Plasma TVs.

The primary focus on the picture performance of Plasma TVs is the HDTV resolution. Before the advent of HDTV, viewers were not concerned with the resolution factor in TVs, since there was no other resolution other than a single resolution at that time. However, with the introduction of different kinds of resolutions in TVs, everything started to change.

With the coming of progressive scanning, further enhancement was achieved as regards to the resolution factor. Picture quality improved to a great length, with the technology providing "sequential scanning" instead of interlaced lines. This made picture presentation more compact, as you see it in movies, and progressive technology presented sharper details on HDTV Plasma screen. Today, it has become important for a TV buyer to know how many scan lines, 420, 720, or 1080 can the TV display, and whether the image is displayed in interlaced (i) or progressive (p) scan format.

Pictures on a TV screen are differently displayed than in movie theaters. In movies, the image is projected on the screen as a whole. On the other hand, the picture on your top HDTV Plasma TV is made up of lines, and with each line scanned, that portion of the picture appears on the TV screen. In this way, when the lines are scanned at a high speed, and with the frames being refreshed at 50 to 60Hz, your eyes can see a complete picture. However, the picture that you see is not of the same quality as you have in movie theaters. The difference is more noticeable in the interlaced technology, where the even and odd lines are scanned alternately, unlike progressive scan, where the lines are scanned sequentially, providing a higher effect of the resolution.

To summarize, the more the vertical scan, the better the resolution gets. For example, the resolution in 1080p top plasma HDTVs is much higher than that of 720p. But then again, it must be remembered that, the picture quality of a TV does not only depend upon the kind of resolution that your TV has, and amongst other things, it also depends on the resolution of the video signal your TV receives.