HDTV Almanac

I know, I know, you’ve heard that “sleeping giant” stuff too much lately. China’s economy is becoming inexorably tied to that of the U.S., but there may be some ways that you haven’t considered yet. For example, thanks to cheap manufacturing costs, many of our consumer electronics products are priced at just a fraction of what they were a few years ago, including HDTVs. Okay, maybe that’s not news either.

But I just received a presentation that was made by Lia Fang, President of Corning Display Technologies China, at the DisplaySearch China 2010 conference. It was full of fascinating information, but this was the slide that caused me to pause.

China nearly matches the U.S. in terms of the availability of electricity, which as we saw in this country in the last century, can be a driving force for building a middle class. As they acquire labor-saving devices, people have more time to be more productive. This increases their earning power, and they can start acquiring more consumer goods.

But look at the signs of middle class in China now. They outnumber us in terms of Internet users by 68 million. They have 45% more televisions in use than in the U.S. but only about half as many LCD TVs. They already buy more TVs per year than we do in the U.S. What will happen as they start to replace those existing TVs with LCDs? And what happens when the remaining 0.9 billion people decide that they want and can afford a TV?

One thing that will happen is that we are likely to shift from a surplus to a shortage for LCD and plasma TVs. And when the market faces a shortage instead of a surplus, prices are likely to stop dropping. There is always the hope that increased production will lead to greater efficiencies which will help drive down costs, but this presumes that all the supply chains for materials and other resources are able to keep pace.

The U.S. has been in the enviable position of being in the driver’s seat, with our demand defining the features and functions of consumer electronics, especially HDTVs. The picture presented by Corning has me wondering how much longer that will remain true.

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.

You may recognize “Carl Zeiss” as the company that makes excellent optics for cameras and binoculars and telescopes, but the company also makes a head-mounted display system named “cinemizer“. At the recent IFA show, the company revealed an upgraded model that uses OLED panels in the goggles to deliver the images.

Now, the downside is that these goggles are limited to 640 by 480 resolution — that’s standard definition — so you’ll be losing a lot if you try to watch HD content on them. And they’re not inexpensive. And it’s not clear if they will be marketed in the U.S., or just in Europe for now.

But if you’re looking to get a big-screen experience from OLED technology this year, this may be your best bet. Samsung showed their new 7″ Samsung Galazy Tab tablet device at IFA, and revealed that it will only have an LCD screen. After all of Samsung’s brave talk about OLED displays, some may find this disappointing but there are plenty of us who view this news as no surprise. We’re still a long way out from large scale production of OLED displays larger than a cell phone screen.

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.

TWICE commissioned a survey about consumer opinion about 3DTV, and the results have some interesting highlights. A good place to start is the fact that about 78% of the respondents have seen at least one 3D movie in a cinema. This is interesting because nearly the identical 78% have never seen a 3DTV.

Now, nearly the same 78% of those who had seen a 3D movie were positive about the experience, but only 54% had positive comments about the 3DTV viewing experience. Only 54% of the total said that they would consider buying a 3DTV, but most of them figured it would be more than a year before they’d buy one. The three most common reasons for not getting a 3DTV were the need to buy additional items (41%), the cost (36%), and the lack of content (24%).

TWICE published the results under the headline “Consumers Know 3D But Need More Convincing”. My take on the results is a bit different; the consumers appear to be well-informed, and they are waiting for the prices to come down and the amount of available content to go up. I wouldn’t call that a need for convincing as much as this is the sign of a patient attitude. Aside from the early adopters, the value proposition just isn’t strong enough yet for the average consumer. I expect that we’re right on track for broader acceptance of 3DTV in late 2012 and into 2013.

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).

Did you ever notice that with technology, it often seems to be two steps forward but one step back? Before digital TV, our analog tuners could change channels at the speed of a thumb-press. (This was even true in the early days of the remote controls. My grandmother had a Zenith Space Command, and when my uncle’s black lab came in the room and shook its dog tags, the jangling sound would cause the channels to change wildly!) Now we’ve advanced to HDTV and lots of fancy features, but not everything is an improvement.

For example, what happens when you want to channel surf and you press the Channel Up button? Probably nothing, at least for about a second. I sometimes will press the button three or four times in rapid succession, in hopes that I’ve got the count right to get to the desired channel. It’s a small price to pay for the other benefits, but it’s still annoying.

That’s why Broadcom has developed “FastRTV“, which provides nearly instantaneous channel switching for cable system set-top boxes and other devices. And the great thing about it is that the cable company doesn’t have to do anything different to the digital signal that it is already sending out. The company claims that the switching speed is up to five times faster, but judge for yourself; scroll down on this page to find a video demonstration of the technology.

Now, Broadcom is a company that makes chips that go into the set-top boxes and other devices that the cable companies buy for their customers, so you can’t just go on Amazon and buy a FastRTV device for your system. But it might not hurt to ask your cable company if they offer boxes with this feature. Comcast apparently is deploying boxes with the FastRTV feature, and others are likely to follow suit.

So it may take a little time, but eventually technology takes another two steps forward to put you ahead of where you were. And one more little annoyance is eliminated.

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.

Conventional wisdom holds that people won’t buy 3DTVs by the millions because they don’t want to wear the goofy glasses and there isn’t enough content available. I’ve already addressed the first item, but let’s look at the second one for a moment.

According to the 3D@Home site, Hollywood plans to release about 40 movies – new and conversions — in 3D next year. Figure an hour and a half to two hours per movie, that’s maybe 70 hours of programming. At three hours a night, that’s maybe enough for three weeks of prime time programming for just one channel. In a world of 500 channels, that’s not much. But what if Hollywood came up with a way to convert their back catalog of movies and TV shows into 3D?

The fact is that a typical 2D photo image has lots of visual cues that can be used to extract depth data. Factors like changes to patterns and textures, perspective angles, relative size, and overlapping objects can all be used to determine how far apart objects are in a scene. Teach a computer to recognize those factors, and it can create stereoscopic images automatically. But that requires a lot of expensive computing power.

Or does it? I just got a press release from ArcSoft about their new MediaConverter 7 . The program has the “ability to turn your 2D photos and videos into 3D.” It supports anaglyph (red/blue glasses) as well as page flip and interleave modes. Oh, and it only costs $39.99.

Now, I have not used this program so I don’t know how good the results are. But that’s not the point. Even if it can only do a lousy job at this point, the processing can only get better and faster. (You can now buy a fully-equipped quad-core PC kit for $250 these days so the computing power is cheap.) If you can do a lousy job on a PC for $40, think of what you could do if you spend $40,000 on the software. That’s still way less than the budget for shooting a 2D movie or even a TV episode.

It seems to me that we’re on track to have mass conversions of back catalog material within the next two years, just as the installed base is reaching critical mass and the cost difference for 3DTV over 2D approaches zero. Start saving now; 2013 looks to be the year when you’ll be buying a 3DTV.