How many lines are there in television?

Answer 1

All television images are made up from multiple horizontal lines. The earliest televisions used just 30 lines. Today's standard definition televisions use 480 lines in North America, Japan and other countries or 576 lines in Europe and many other countries.

With the move towards HD, the number of lines has increased. The common line counts are 720 or 1080 and these are used worldwide. Another standard for HD is 1035 lines although this has fallen into disuse and is rarely seen.

Super HD is an emerging standard and one that is used for certain high resolution applications and this features 2160 lines. This format is not used outside some specialist commercial applications.

Answer 2

There are several answers to the question.

Standard definition television in Europe uses 625 lines of which 576 are used to create the image. The remaining lines are either unused or carry ancillary data.

North America uses 525 lines of which 480 are used for the image.

With HD television, there are two line counts. 720 and 1080. In each case, these are the number of lines used to generate the image with additional lines being used for ancillary data. The number of lines used in HD is the same for both European and North American broadcasts.