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| Pan-and-Scan |
An alternative to letterboxing, the process by which a 16:9 image is converted for display on a 4:3 television by zooming in on the picture and panning to the part of the image that is most interesting. This allows the image to fill the entire screen, but causes some portions of the image not to be displayed. |
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| Pillar Box |
The term used when 4:3 content is viewed on a16:9 screen. In order to display the "more square." traditional picture on a widescreen monitor, black bars are placed down the sides of the screen. |
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| Pixel |
Pixel is actually two words combined - "Picture" and "Element." Pixels are tiny samples of video information, the "little squares" that "add up" to an entire picture. A pixel is the smallest area of a television picture capable of being sampled and transmitted through a system, and displayed on a monitor. |
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| Plasma TV |
A Plasma Display Panel (PDP) is a type of flat panel display common to large TV displays (32 inches or larger). Plasma displays should not be confused with LCD displays, another lightweight "flatscreen" display using different technology. |
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| Plug and Play (Plug n Play, Plug-and-Play) |
See Digital Cable Ready (DCR). |
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| Polarisation |
A property of light which can be used to create 3D images when polarised glasses are worn to view two images with differing polarity. |
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| Postage Stamp |
Some TV programs are letterboxed or pillar-boxed during broadcast, which results in a 16:9 format broadcast that already has bars above and below it. When such a broadcast is viewed on a 16:9 set, it results in bars appearing above, below, and on the sides - a result called a Postage Stamp. |
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| Progressive Scan |
A way to scan vertical lines onto a TV picture by scanning all the lines consecutively (progressively). At the same number of lines, progressive scan produces a higher quality picture than interlace scan. All flat panel and many digital projection televisions are progressive scan, so they display progressive scan images more clearly compared to interlaced images. The alternative to Progressive Scan is Interlace Scan. |
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| Pulldown, 3-2 |
A process by which a movie shot in 24 frames per second (fps) is shown as an interlace scan television image at 30 frames per second. |
