HDTV Almanac

On Wednesday, Pioneer rolled out two new KURO plasma HDTV models. Both are 1080p models with one year warranties, and are scheduled to ship in June. The PDP-5020FD is a 50″ version with a list price of $4,000, and the 60″ PDP-6020FD has a $5,500 list price. The KURO technology empahsizes creating very dark black levels, which gives the images excellent contrast and eye-popping color. It is clear that the technology creates beautiful images, but it’s not as certain that the extra quality can continue to command the price premium that you find on Pioneer products.

If you have questions about what HDTV to buy, you have the opportunity to ask me in person! On Wednesday, May 14, I’ll be at the B&H Event Space in New York City, delivering a presentation on “How to Choose the Right HDTV” from 3 PM to 5 PM. You will also be able to purchase an autographed copy of Professor Poor’s Guide to Buying HDTV. The B&H Event Space is at 420 9th Avenue. The presentation is free, but they recommend that you register online in order to make sure you get a seat. More information is available at http://www.bhphotovideo.com/eventspace. I hope to see you there.

Sony’s XEL-1 OLED TV is gorgeous and impossibly thin; there is no argument possible about either of those facts. And that’s enough to make people go gaga over it, even though it is about one sixteenth the size of a 42″ 1080p LCD TV and more than twice the price. Oh, and it’s not even HD. But it still looks cool.

Sony says that it’s good for 30,000 hours, or about 10 years of service. DisplaySearch begs to differ, having conducted its own tests. According to their press release, the unit will be half as bright after just 5,000 hours of showing a full white image, and after 17,000 hours of typical video content. The reason for the difference is that the OLED phosphors grow dimmer with use, and a full white image uses all the pixels all the time. A typical movie scene uses less than 25% of the available brightness in the display, and video content falls somewhere between those two proportions.

More disturbing are the results on “differential aging”. The problem with OLED materials is that the blue phosphors lose their brightness much faster than the red and green phosphors. According to DisplaySearch’s tests, after just 1,000 hours of use the blue phosphor light output dropped by 12%. This is in contrast with the 7% drop for red and 8% drop for green. If the set were to include a feedback circuit that would lower the red and green levels to match the blue output, then the set would reach half brightness that much sooner. But if no adjustment is made, then the image will become yellow; red, green, and blue make white, but with less blue, the red and green will give the image a yellow tint. This is hardly acceptable for a product as expensive as the Sony OLED TV.

The danger here is that people may decide that OLEDs don’t work, based on their experience with the XEL-1. This happened with the early plasma HDTVs; the technology is still trying to live down the reputation for short lifespan and permanent image burn-in problems.

A group of Chinese companies announced the creation of a new consortium last week, with the goal of creating and promoting a new interface for consumer electronics products. They call it the Digital Interface for Video and Audio, which results in the unfortunate acronym, DIVA. Backing this new move are some major and influential companies, most of which you probably have never heard of, including Sichuan Chang Hong Electric Co.; Qingdao Haier Co.; Hisense Electric Co.; Konka Group; Nanjing Panda Electronics Co.; Skyworth Group; SVA Information Industry Co.; TCL Corporation; and Synerchip Co., Ltd. Even if you have never seen these names before, you undoubtedly have seen televisions, computer monitors, and other devices that these companies have built to be sold under some very famous brands.

The new interface will transmit uncompressed digital audio and video signals. It will also support high-speed bidirectional data connections, which is an essential requirement for interactive television and accessing content on the Internet. It will also make it possible to control multiple consumer electronics components with a single remote control, as well as connect to content — music, photos, and video — stored on digital appliances on a home network.

The group plans to demonstrate DIVA at a conference in China on May 21, and plans on publishing the final specification before the end of 2008.

So why do we need a connection in addition to HDMI? The computer folks are trying to get away from HDMI with their new DisplayPort digital connection, but that has met with only limited success so far. I suspect that motivation behind DIVA is similar to the driving force behind DisplayPort: licensing fees. Anyone using HDMI has to pay royalties to use the technology. And if the Chinese hate to do anything, it’s pay royalties for technology. So I would not be at all surprised to find that the DIVA movement could result in lower fees for consumer electronics manufacturers.

And why should DIVA succeed where others have failed? Again, the consortium includes a Who’s Who of Chinese consumer electronics manufacturers, and they are responsible for building a huge portion of the consumer electronics products sold worldwide. If they all get behind the use of a specific interface, they may well have the clout to make it stick. And having a digital interface that truly handles audio, video, and data on a single cable could definitely simplify the setup and user interface for complex configurations of home entertainment devices and networks.

This DIVA bears watching.

Time Warner, parent company of cable giant Time Warner Cable, said last week that it intends to spin-off the cable service as a separate company. The parent company owns 84% of the publicly-traded subsidiary, and has not yet announced details of how it intends to separate from the cable company which is still profitable and adding new customers.

Clearly, the cable business is in a state of flux, especially since it is so closely entwined with the high-speed broadband Internet access business. New applications and revenue streams remain just over the horizon, and everyone is searching for the next Google or Amazon. By selling off the cable operation, Time Warner could focus on its other businesses, perhaps leaving the cable portion free to respond more quickly to changes and opportunities as they arise.

These certainly are difficult times for the television industry and all the related services. Nobody knows for certain what the video landscape will look like even five years from now, but I promise you that it will be significantly different from today.

Roll out the red carpet and set up those swirling spotlights in your front yard; new DVD movie releases are coming directly to your living room, thanks to iTunes. And you don’t need the DVD.

“Day-and-date” is the oddly redundant term used by the film industry to refer to the release of movie content. iTunes has made arrangements with major studios to make their movies available on the same day that the DVD version of the movie is released. The studios include 20th Century Fox, The Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Lionsgate, Image Entertainment, and First Look Studios. You can download the movies and watch them at home without ever setting foot in the DVD store.

Apple charges $9.99 for most of its catalog titles, and $14.95 for new releases. According to the company press release, they have more than 1,500 movies available, 200 of which are in high-definition. You can also rent titles for $2.99 — $3.99 for new releases and high definition for $1 more – if you don’t want to buy the movie. Watching on your HDTV requires Apple TV, or you can watch the movies on many of the iPod and iPhone models.

iTunes helped put legal downloads of music tracks on the map, and it’s likely that their efforts to expand access to movies through downloads will further legitimize this new distribution method. Currently, the service is still too tightly coupled with the proprietary Apple hardware and software for my taste, but a rising tides raises all boats and if Apple finds succes here it could help expand the other choices available.

Tell me again why I should be spending several hundred dollars on a Blu-ray player?

Last weekend, I drove 18 miles to recycle a carload of used computers, monitors, keyboards, printers, and other electronic equipment. A local township was sponsoring the event, and since they didn’t have a limit on the number of items you could drop off, it was worth the drive. I had some other options – including some online recycling services — but this was the most convenient and it was free.

Now comes news of a service that I might have used instead had it been available. Sam’s Club has just announced ecoNEW, an online recycling program available for Sam’s Club members. You can find out the details at www.econewonline.com/samsclub, where you’ll find that it has a number of attractive features. According to the company’s press release, the program accepts just about everything: ” LCD monitors, digital cameras, PC desktops and laptops, gaming systems, MP3 players, camcorders, and printers.” (Unfortunately, there’s no mention of televisions.) Not only does it not cost you anything to recycle the products, but if they have a trade-in value, you’ll actually get money back in the form of a Sam’s Club gift card. And if the item does not have a trade-in value, you can still print out a pre-paid shipping label that lets you ship the item to the recycling center for free.

In addition to all this, the program has a “no export and no landfill” guarantee. One of the problems with some recycling programs is that the electronics are shipped by the container load to other countries where workers often are exposed to unsafe conditions as they try to extract the valuable parts of the products. All products in the ecoNEW program will be either refurbished or parted out as components and resold, or they will be broken down into raw materials that will be reused.

It would be enough to make me join Sam’s Club (if I hadn’t just taken all those computers to be recycled).

A report from Digitimes last week indicate that Samsung is proceeding with plans to build medium and large OLED panels suitable for notebook computers and televisions, starting next year in 2009. The article also cites a Samsung vice-president as saying that flexible OLED displays will start production in 2010.

Samsung expects to ramp up production to 3 million units per year in 2009, about double the current capacity. Reportedly, this will enable economies of scale that will make it practical to build larger panels, rather than stick to the smaller panels designed for use in mobile devices such as cell phones and MP3 players.

This news is encouraging, but for many reasons, may be overly optimistic. There are many problems that remain to be solved for OLEDs, especially if they are to be used in long duty cycle products such as televisions. One of the most serious problems is that of differential phosphor aging. This sounds complex and technical, but basically it refers to the fact that the blue phosphors used in OLEDs fade more rapidly than the green or red phosphors. If you don’t compensate for this effect, the image turns yellow before long. If you do compensate by dialing back the brightness of the red and green, then the whole image gets dimmer sooner. Neither are acceptable solutions at this point, so the “blue phosphor problem” will have to be solved before OLED HDTVs become practical. Progress is being made on this problem, as well as on the problem of encapsulating the display to keep out the oxygen and water vapor that can ruin the panel.

It would be wonderful if Samsung will have all this ironed out by next year. However, if this is another case of raised expectations as we witnessed with the Canon/Toshiba SED technologies, failure to deliver on these target deliveries runs the risk of discrediting both the company and the technology.

When we talk about HDTV, we tend to focus on professionally-generated content that is commercially distributed one way or another. But this totally overlooks another important source of HD video: user-generated content. There’s only one problem; most HDTV video cameras are extremely expensive.

DXG USA has announced the DXG-569V HD camcorder. It comes in your choice of silver or black, and can record video at 1280 by 720 at 30 frames per second. The camera can also be used as an 8 megapixel still photo camera with an LED flash if needed. There’s a 3-inch diagonal LCD screen so you can preview your shots. It uses SD cards for storage and supports the High-Capacity SD format, so you can either plug the card into your computer or use a USB 2.0 interface to transfer your videos to a computer. You can even use the camera as a digital voice recorder. And the package includes ArcSoft’s Total Media Extreme software that lets you edit and burn home movies in HD. According to the company, the camera will be available at Radio Shack and other consumer electronics retailers.

The surprising thing about this camera is the list price: $169.99. Just a few years ago, that would have been an amazing price for an 8 megapixel still camera, let alone a full speed, 720p HD camcorder. Now, I have not tested this camera so I can’t comment on the quality of the images; at this price, I don’t expect to get professional quality results. Still, it is likely to be satisfactory for most home movie — or small business — applications. Note that many companies are moving to wide format Powerpoint presentations as their standard format, and this camera could easily be used to capture custom video inexpensively that could really punch up a sales pitch. So whether it’s a birthday party or a soccer game or the opening of a new manufacturing plant, cameras like the DXG-569V HD could open the door to a new world of HD user-generated video content.

The HDTV market continues to consolidate. The latest company to scale down operations and expectations is JVC. The company is ceasing production in Japan and Scotland, and will focus its manufacturing operations in other markets where it can make a larger profit.

There had been reports that JVC was also going to stop selling TVs in Japan, which would have been a huge step. Instead, TWICE is now reporting that the company is only going to stop selling “mass-market LCD TV models” and instead will only market models 42″ and larger.

Unfortunately, there still are a lot of companies that want to just focus on the 42″ and larger market, and I don’t see how they all can be successful. Here in the United States, I expect that JVC will continue to find it more and more difficult to get retail shelf space for their product. There is too little difference in price and quality between JVC and the step up to the top brands such as Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, or Pioneer, and too little between JVC and the step down to Westinghouse, Vizio, or Olevia. JVC is getting squeezed out of the middle, and the softening of the U.S. market for larger models is not going to help their efforts to survive in the HDTV market.

Reuters reported this week that Netflix has expanded its partnerships with set-top box makers. In addition to their existing deal with LG Electronics, the company expects to announce three more partnerships that will let subscribers watch movies on their TVs, streamed directly from the Internet. The Netflix CEO stated that we can expect to see products from all four companies that incorporate the streaming functions before the end of this year.

According to the article, the online streaming will be bundled with the regular subscription plans at no extra charge. Netflix currently has about 9,000 movies and TV episodes available on their PC service, compared with about 100,000 movie titles in their DVD-by-mail service.

As postage rates continue to rise, Internet delivery of movies makes a great deal of sense, and set-top box partnerships should make selecting a Netflix movie as easy as picking a channel or any cable video-on-demand program. This is clearly where the movie rental market is headed, and it looks as though we’re going to be able to enjoy Netflix this way starting later this year. The big problem then will be how fast the company can convert its physical library for digital distribution.