HDTV movement
Oct 15th, 2005 by Brian A. Thomas
There has been lots of news on the HDTV front of late.
The big current news is that is is looking like date they will stop transmitting regular television signals and move only to high definition signals will be either 31 December 2008 or April 2009 (Yahoo! news). Originally, the end of 2006 was to be the deadline, or when 85% of households could get HDTV. Unfortunately they didn’t define what 85% means, do they mean 85% have HDTV sets or converter boxes, or that 85% could get HDTV right now if they were to get a converter box or HDTV? If it is the former, then we are not there yet by a long shot, if it is the latter then we are there as almost all the stations have an HDTV broadcast. Of course most people get their TV from cable, which for the most part isn’t giving the HDTV signal for the local channels, just the regular analog channel, even on digital cable.
Whichever date ends up being in the final version, retailers will need to let consumers know that if they are buying a standard definition television, the set will become useless without a HDTV converter box, or cable/satellite box capable of doing the converting, before they buy the set. This is good as I still see lots of standard sets being sold and going out the door. For the last few years I figure there is no way I would buy a standard definition set, especially when the cutoff date then was late 2006. Even with the extension to 2009, I would suggest buying the best HDTV you can now over a standard television. With that suggestion is make sure it is widescreen since most of the HDTV broadcast formats that will be used are widescreen.
There are exceptions to the widescreen broadcast rule, TBN for example multicasts all its channels on its digital broadcast, that is, they make 4 or 5 digital channels available in the space it takes to broadcast a HDTV signal. It is still a digital signal, and it still needs a converter box or a cable/satellite box capable of converting the signal to watch them on a regular tv, but simply lacks the high resolution picture one gets with HDTV. It makes sense for TBN, the shopping channels, local access and the like to use multicast over HDTV, as they don’t need the full high definition picture.
On the personally more exciting level. We are finally seeing 1080p HDTV sets show up. 1080p is the highest resolution available in HDTV, and until now, no sets could do it. Most of the sets you see today, while they say they can do 1080i (one step below 1080p), they are actually 702p sets, that down convert the 1080i signal to 720p. It is important when you buy a new set to be sure what its true resolution is. It must do 1,920 x 1,080 pixels to be a true HDTV set, and preferably do that in a progressive picture. (The p in 1080p and 720p is for progressive, the i in 1080i is for interlaced… which I may explain in another post).
The set I am most excited about is Toshiba’s SED sets coming in March 2006. These sets will have a 1080p picture with a refresh rate of under 1 ms (millisecond… that is to say it will take less then 1 millionth of a second to refresh the picture). They are set to have a 100,000:1 contrast ratio (the normal contrast ratio on LCD is 1,000:1 with the original SED examples at 8,600:1… contrast ratio is the color difference between black and white, the bigger the contrast ratio the whiter the whites and more difficult for tv sets, the blacker the blacks). SED is basically a CRT (like a tube tv set or computer monitor), made thin. Think of it as a LCD where each pixel is a CRT screen… CRTs give the best picture quality of any technology out there. SEDs will be many times better then LCD, DLP, LCoS or Plasma, and possibly then OLEDs if they ever get to market in larger sizes.
If you have enough money, and want a good HDTV set right now, you can’t beat a Sony SXRD set, like the Sony KDS-R50XBR1 50″ Grand Wega SXRD High-Definition 1080p rear-projection TV ($3,999.99) or the Sony KDS-R60XBR1 60″ Grand Wega SXRD High-Definition 1080p rear-projection TV ($4,999.99) . Simply amazing picture quality. (Contrast on it is 3,000:1 so still less then the prototype SED, but still better then LCD). They are not flat panel, but it is one of the nicest sets out there. If I was to buy a TV today… and had that kind of money to spend on it, that would be the way I would have to go… it makes my mouth water thinking of those… and they are cheaper then the SEDs are expected to be. One negative about these sets, is while they do display a 1080p picture, they currently do not have inputs for a 1080p picture, so it may be best to wait… odd that they don’t as Sony’s own Playstation 3 will output 1080p.
I am not impressed with any of the flat panel sets available today. Only a couple of the LCD sets do 1080p as a native picture, most at best do 1080i, and almost all the Plasma sets down convert everything to 720p, though there are a couple prototype 1080p Plasmas out there.
