HDTV Almanac

I first mentioned XpanD’s plan to make “universal” 3D shutter glasses back in March. At the IFA conference in Germany last week, the company unveiled the new glasses. The X103 model sells for about $145 a pair.

The company also revealed a list of compatible sets on their Web Site. This list includes models from Sony, Samsung, LG, and Panasonic, among others.

Yes, the price is still high, but we expect high prices for the early adopters. By the time that there’s enough content to make it worth buying a 3D capable HDTV (and the price premium for 3D support had dropped to near-zero), I expect the cost of these glasses to drop to about $50 a pair, which is less than lots of people pay for a pair of sunglasses, or even on taking the family to the local cinema to see a movie. So if you can wait two years, you’ll get a much better price.

I long for the old days, when things were simpler. Back when a computer monitor was a computer monitor, and a TV was a TV. It’s not that way anymore. Almost all TVs now have a way that lets you connect it to a laptop or desktop computer: either a VGA connector, or an HDMI connector that can hook up to a DVI port. But we still have computer monitors that don’t have TV tuners, so you can’t watch television programming on them (unless you stream it over the Internet or something like that).

Well, not so fast. Samsung has announced their 30 series of “computer monitors” that are available now, and a new 90 series of monitors that will ship in September. The 24″ FX2490HD has an LED backlight, 1080p resolution, two HDMI connectors in addition to VGA and component video connectors, and a USB port that lets you play content stored on a thumb drive. And it includes tuners and a coax connection for cable or over-the-air signals. It even can do picture-in-picture.

Hey, I don’t know about you, but this waddles and quacks like a familiar waterfowl. I really don’t get why it’s not an HDTV. I do get that it’s a compact display, and if I were sending a kid off to college, this would be just the sort of space-saving convenience that I’d want to send along. But why this would do the job better than some other 24″ display that is called an HDTV escapes me at this point.

There’s been a buzz caused by a news item from the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun. According to the story, Toshiba has plans to release 3DTV models later this year that will not require the special glasses used with other 3D displays such as those from Panasonic or Samsung. Here’s the key section from the story:

Toshiba has developed an integral imaging system that emits rays of light at different angles, allowing viewers’ brains to recreate 3-D images without special glasses. The new technology also will enable viewers to enjoy 3-D content from numerous viewing positions, and the images will not strain the eyes, the sources said.

Before you join the excited throngs, note the “numerous viewing positions” phrase. While the article is not specific, this sounds exactly like a typical lenticular lens arrangement that has been used in computer monitors and other displays to create auto-stereoscopic (no glasses) 3D images for years. In fact, it’s exactly the same concept behind those “flicker” baseball cards that I knew about half a century ago; as you turn the card, you see a different image. A flat panel display using this approach will let you see one image with the left eye and a different image with the right eye. But there’s one huge catch; you have to be seated in a specific location in order to see the two images in the correct eyes.

Early displays of this type only had only one “sweet spot”. I think it was about five years ago that Philips demonstrated a large flat panel that had nine viewing points, but as far as I know, they have never made it into a commercial product. (It was expensive at the time, and they figured that it would be used for digital signage, not home entertainment.)

So the key point here is that you will have to sit in specific locations around the room in order to see the 3D effect. I know that people say that they don’t like the idea of having to wear “goofy glasses” just to watch TV, and to spend all the money required to have enough glasses on hand when company comes over. But I believe that forcing people to sit in specific locations in the room is going to be even less popular.

And there’s an economic reason why I don’t think this will work. With existing 3DTV sets, they don’t cost much more than equivalent sets without 3D support. And that difference is going to rapidly fall to near-zero. By putting the extra cost in the glasses, they can keep the price of the sets competitive with 2D sets. If you increase the production costs of the TV significantly however — and I expect that the cost for these Toshiba sets will be considerably higher – people will balk at paying extra. And as the cost of the glasses falls, which it will, the auto-stereoscopic approach is going to be too expensive by comparison.

This story is a case of old wine in new bottles, and I don’t see how it can be successful for Toshiba.

I know I’m not the only one who gets peeved about this; you’re watching a show, then a commercial comes on and blasts you out of your seat with a high volume setting. It’s not just broadcast video; I’ve also noticed this (with dismay) on streaming sites such as Hulu. I’ve written about this problem before, including a mention of a product from SRS Labs that uses the company’s technology that is also built into many current HDTV models.

Now comes the announcement of another device, this time from Gefen.

The box can accept and output either analog stereo or digital (TOSLINK or S/PDIF) audio signals. It relies on Dolby Volume leveling technology, which can also enhance the low and high range levels in order to create a more natural-sounding experience, no matter how loud or quiet you have the volume set. And it has a simple bypass button on the front so that you can turn off the effect if you want. The Gefen product is a little pricey at $179 direct, but it has sophisticated modeling technology inside that may well outperform the feature that is built into your TV set (if it has volume leveling).

It was 2008 when I last wrote about Canon’s SED technology, after they won a lawsuit over a technology license agreement and their decision to abandon efforts to make a consumer product and focus instead on a high-end monitor for commercial video production facilities.

According to a report in Network World this week, Canon has finally thrown in the towel and pulled the plug on the project. After 15 years of work, the company apparently has conceded that they to market. And so dies one more branch of the technology tree that hopes to bring us thin, energy-efficient, emissive, high-resolution flat panel color displays.

SED stands for “surface-condition electron-emitter display” (though some shortened that to just “surface emitter display”). It is a close relative of the field-emitter display (FED) technology. Canon came up with a way to create a microscopic gap between two conductors, then bridge it with a material that would emit light when the gap produced electrons. I remember seeing the first public prototype demonstration in Boston at a Society for Information Display conference around 1997, and it created an instant buzz. The fun fact about it was that Canon engineers used a standard BubbleJet printhead on an X-Y positioning system in order to deposit the tiny amounts of material required at each junction.

A few years ago, Canon started showing pre-production prototypes in television sizes at CES and other events. The image quality was stunning, and since it was an emissive technology like plasma, there were no viewing angle issues. And the panel didn’t produce any light when the power to a pixel was turned off, so the blacks were incredibly rich and deep.

Sadly, Canon could not produce a competitively priced product, even at the professional level. They might have had a chance back when an HDTV cost $5,000 to $10,000, but there’s just no market for something in that price range when the competition is around one-tenth that price. The rapid and steady fall of plasma and LCD prices — about 20% a year for the past few years — has made it all but impossible for new technologies to ramp up to the production scale required to compete on price.

OLED is still hanging on, thanks to its success in the mobile display market including cell phones and MP3 players, but I still think we’re years away from a 32″ OLED HDTV, and years beyond that before they become competitive with LCD pricing. FED is also still hanging around, as researchers explore how carbon nanotubes (CNT) may form an emitter layer that is inexpensive and reliable. But don’t hold your breath.

It’s not enough to have a better technology at this point. It also has to be cost-competitive and ramp up almost overnight to production at the level of millions of units per year, all while maintaining sufficient yield results that you can still scrape off a little profit from the money that flows through the operation. Expect your flat panel choices to be limited to LCD and plasma for the time being.

Rather than spend it at Bernie’s, how about spending the weekend of September 10 through 12 at your local electronics store? The Consumer Electronics Association (hosts of the mammoth CES show in Las Vegas every January) and ESPN are joining forces to create “National 3D Demo Days“. ESPN will provide continuous 3D programming for those three days from 10 AM to 11 PM Eastern.

The content will include live college football, recorded coverage from this summer’s FIFA World Cup soccer tournament (the other “football”), and footage of the Harlem Globetrotters, and highlights from X Games 16. The CEA has posted a list of participating retailers here: http://www.digitaltips.org/video/retailer-locator.asp.

The fact remains that we don’t yet have that much 3D content available, but this is a good effort to help consumers learn more about the technology and find out what they need to get so that they can take advantage of the 3D coverage at home. I also suspect that this is part of a concerted effort to get subscription television services including cable and telco to allocate resources to the distribution of 3D content and channels as they become available.

We’ve got a chicken and egg problem here, and it looks as though both sides are working together to bootstrap the process. I still think that unless you’re an early adopter, you’re best off waiting until late 2012. By that point, 3D capability should not add much of a premium – if any — to the cost of a new television, and the supply of 3D content should be much greater by then. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t go join the fun the second weekend in September.

Many of the major LCD panel manufacturers have already pleaded guilty to price fixing charges in U.S. federal courts — paying close to $1 billion in fines – and now the states are lining up to get a piece of the action in the form of defending their citizens who were ripped off by the price fixing. New York and Florida were first to step up to take their swings at the plate, and now Illinois and Washington have stepped into the batter’s box. These suits go after the big players — including Samsung, LG, and Sharp — as well as other LCD manufacturers. The states are seeking damages for overcharging, penalties, and fees from the defendant companies.

The part that amazes me in the story is that this is one cartel that must have been particularly inept in their efforts to fix prices. Apparently in spite of their efforts, prices for flat panel HDTVs have fallen about 20% a year for the past few years — in spite of improved technology and new features — and we still have experienced situations of serious oversupply that has helped drive prices down. If they were keeping prices artificially high — which they apparently have admitted doing – then my mind boggles at how much lower the prices might be by now.

The market research firm DisplaySearch is now forecasting that about 3.4 million 3DTVs will be shipped in 20210, for about a 5% share of the total worldwide HDTV market. One of its competitors in the display market research business is iSupply, which now predicts that about 4.2 million 3DTVs will ship this year. DisplaySearch’s prediction for the year 2014 is 42.9 million, which is considerably more pessimistic than iSupply’s 60.5 million forecast.

Whichever number you choose, the big growth in this segment isn’t expected to start until 2012 at which point the premium for 3D capability will be reduced and there will be more content available to attract consumers.

The analysts at iSupply make an interesting point in their forecasts. They predict that the sales of NeTVs — HDTVs that can connect directly to a network to access the Internet — will significantly outsell 3DTVs over the same period. They predict 27.7 million worldwide units this year, growing to 148.3 million in 2014.

I suspect that they are probably right that the NeTVs will sell better. First, the technology has been out longer, and so the premium is getting smaller for the feature. 3D capability is still limited to the larger, premium models which do not sell in the same volumes as more affordable models. At the same time, the Internet connectivity is migrating down into smaller and less expensive models, so it makes good sense that they will sell more.

Netgear has announced their new ReadyNAS Ultra storage devices. NAS stands for “network attached storage” which means that the data on its hard drives can be accessed by any device on your home network. This provides you with a powerful storage system that lets you share files and create backups of critical data – including music, video, and photo files — from all your home computers.

One key feature of the devices is their ability to store data from a TiVo DVR using the network connection. And once the data is in the NAS box, it can be streamed to any TiVo box on your network. The device can also automatically reformat streaming video for viewing on mobile devices or home computers, transcoding on the fly. And Skifta software lets you access your media files from any DLNA-compatible device even when you’re away from home; you can even use a smartphone to access your media content remotely.

The four- and six-bay models are slated to ship later this month, with the two-bay models scheduled to be available in October.

FLO TV is Qualcomm’s mobile television service, which it provides under branded names for AT&T and Verizon, as well as directly to consumers. The service essentially provides cable TV content delivered by cell phone services. According to statements by the company CEO reported by Light Reading Mobile, the company is willing to maintain the role of service provider, but the main goal is to promote their MediaFLO technology that is behind the service.

Qualcomm is in the business of making chips for cell phones and other portable wireless devices, so it really is not a great match for it to be in the video broadcast business as well. The company has struggled with the chicken-and-egg problem, as there are not enough devices out there that can use the service, so there aren’t enough subscriptions to make it go. Eventually, the technology could be used for a variety of data distribution services and not just video, but that is slow in developing.

Qualcomm bought wireless bandwidth in the federal auctions associated with the switch to digital TV broadcasts, and is in a position to offload some of the strain experienced by the cell carriers’ data networks. Since it’s a broadcast system instead of point-to-point, the MediaFLO approach uses the same amount of bandwidth whether one or 1,000 phones are receiving the signal, which is not the case for cell phone data systems. On the other hand, it must compete with the new Mobile DTV service from existing television broadcasters.

The FLO TV service is currently available in 110 U.S. cities, but still is underperforming. According to the article, Qualcomm is willing to continue to operate the service but is open to offers from prospective buyers.