A CCD is composes of thousands of sensors arranged in a grid. Simplistically, each sensor captures one pixel’s worth of information. The more sensors in the CCD, therefore, the higher the resolution of the camera. CCDs generally come in two “resolutions”, standard(full CIF) and high (4CIF). For a color camera, standard resolution for a 1/3″ CCD equates to 330 TVL while a high resolution 1/3″ color CCD will have 460 lines of resolution. Black and white cameras, because they don’t need to use as many sensing elements to create a single pixel, generally have higher resolutions. For a 1/3″ black and white CCD, standard resolution is 420 TVL and high resolution is 580 TVL. These  numbers can be vary check the manufactures’s specs.