Native HDTV Display Format
The native display is what your set is built to display. Because it would be extremely expensive to build a set to handle all 18 DTV formats, most manufacturers only include a few ‘Native’ formats for the TV. When your television (or receiver for that matter) receives the signal it is usually not in a format that your television can handle natively. Thus, the signal is converted to your native display format for output.

Native Resolution
See ‘Native HDTV Display Format’

Native Resolution
Usually describes the actual resolution of the display device. If you see native resolution used with LCD, DLP, dILA or Plasma, this will be an exact number. With CRTs, this number is an approximation. Either way, if you see a Max Resolution for the display device, your device will simply scale the image down to it's native resolution. See Scaling / Doubling for more information on that subject.

NIT
A luminance unit equal to 1 candle per square meter measured perpendicular to the rays from the source.

NTSC
NTSC is the National Television Standards Committee and was responsible for developing a standard protocol for broadcasting TV signals in 1953. Not many changes have been made to this protocol since its creation except the addition of new parameters for color broadcasts. The NTSC broadcast has 525 horizontal scan lines which are drawn in an interlaced fashion. The result is one frame every 1/30 a second.