What is HD? What is VGA, XGA, Etc…..

we are creating this article as we have been getting a lot of questions regarding displays of different mobiles currently available in the market that they are WVGA and HD at the same time and people are asking how is that possible. Well in this article we will try to explain to you in the simplest way possible the difference between VGA Resolution and HD Resolution and how they correlate.

1^st of All What is Screen Resolution?

Screen resolution basically refers to the number of pixels in the screen, resolution is measured in the following way “Width x Length”, for example if a screen resolution is 480×800 or WVGA it packs 480 pixels per line in Width and 800 pixels per line in Length multiply them and you get the total number of pixels that are displayed on the screen in this case: 480×800=384,000 pixels or 0.3Mpixels

There are 2 popular measurements of screen resolution today, the problem is people do not know about it and it leads to confusion…both are common and widely used these days.

One is the VGA (Video Graphics Array) and the other is HD (High Definition)…for the sake of simplicity and ease you can imagine these to be like cm(centimeter) and in(inches), both are standards used for measurement.

The only difference is that VGA is used to measure usually more square screens as in our old square TVs and in some cases certain cinema scope screens and HD is used to measure the current 16:9 ratio rectangular screens for example modern day plasma, LCD and LED TVs.

So Now What is HD?
Buy modern definition a rectangular screen having an 16:9 aspect ratio with a vertical (length) wise pixel count greater than or equal to 720 is HD or high definition, a full high definition screen or FHD has a vertical (length) wise pixel count of 1080.

So back to our topic HD and VGA, looking at the above mentioned examples and definition….  A device can be HD technically even if it is being measured in the VGA scale, this is further made easy by the table and picture given below:

Video Graphics Array	Resolution		High Definition	Resolution
QQVGA	(160×120)		nHD	(640×360)
HQVGA	(240×160)		qHD	(960×540)
QVGA	(320×240)		HD	(1280×720)
WQVGA	(400×240)		FHD	(1920×1080)
HVGA	(480×320)		QHD	(2560×1440)
VGA	(640×480)		QFHD (4K)	(3840×2160)
WVGA	(800×480)		UHD (8K)	(7680×4320)
FWVGA	(854×480)
SVGA	(800×600)
DVGA	(960×640)
WSVGA	(1024×576 or 600)
Extended Graphics Array
XGA	(1024×768)
WXGA	(1280×768)
XGA+	(1152×864)
WXGA+	(1440×900)
SXGA	(1280×1024)
SXGA+	(1400×1050)
WSXGA+	(1680×1050)
UXGA	(1600×1200)
WUXGA	(1920×1200)

We generally have the concept in our minds that 1280×720 is HD and 1920×1080 is Full HD but that is not the case in technical terms.
So the next time a company says the mobile screen is WVGA and right next to it they say that it is HD you can understand why they are saying that, because technically it is HD having a Vertical lenghth wise pixel length of 800 which is greater than 720

i hope this article helps you in understanding the concept between HD and VGA

thanks for reading ..