HDTV Almanac

TheStreet reported yesterday that SpatiaLight’s stock on NASDAQ was up 20% on news that the company has shipped LCoS imagers to LG Electronics and Thinktek Optronics. According to the report, company representatives promised two weeks ago that they would ship 1,000 imagers within 30 days. It’s now two weeks later, and they say that they’ve shipped 350 units, which they say is ahead of their schedule.

Hmmm… they’ve shipped about a third of the promised quantity, and about half of the 30 days is gone. There’s too much New Math in all of this for me. The company apparently expects that they will be able to continue to accelerate production. It’s a bit risky making such public promises, especially after LG made so much news when they cancelled their new rear-projection HDTV models that were to use the SpatiaLight imagers.

It’s hard to know the complete truth of the situation, and harder still to predict where this will lead in the near future. Will SpatiaLight be able to deliver as promised this time (as opposed to previous promises that apparently went unfulfilled)? If SpatiaLight does get it in gear, will another rear-projection model make any difference in the market? Will the LCoS advantages win out over the competing LCD and DLP designs? Nobody ever said that this market would be boring!

On Tuesday, I was in New York City for Panasonic’s consumer electronics product line show. One of the announcements that they made was that before the end of this year, they will start shipping a 1080p plasma display that has a diagonal screen size of 103″. Yes, that’s one hundred and three inches: more than 8.5 feet, and nearly three yards. That’s roughly the same diagonal size as a standard queen size mattress. That’s big.

Panasonic didn’t say what they’ll be charging for this monster, but if you have to ask then… well, you know. It will probably cost as much as a new car (and will be almost as big). The story goes that they made one as a technology demo, just to prove that they could, and started getting orders for them from all over. According to one company executive I spoke with, a lot are headed for homes in “southern California.” I guess that the “O.C.” is not so over-the-top after all.

Not everyone is going to have a half acre of wall on which to display 103″ of television, but it’s an impressive sight if you have the room.

Not sure if you can fit a 103″ display in your living room? Professor Poor’s Guide to Buying HDTV makes it easy to determine the right size and resolution screen for your needs.

Digital video recorders — DVRs — have changed the way we watch broadcast television. TiVo is one example, but there are other products you can buy that will do much the same thing. It’s like a VHS recorder on steroids: enormous capacities, easy to access the recorded shows quickly, and you get to watch what you want when you want. The Panasonic model we have even lets us archive off shows onto a DVD-R that we then can play on any DVD player.

But this does mean that it’s one more box in the system, and more boxes mean more connections, and more connections mean more complications, and more complications lead to more support calls by end users. So Cablevision Systems is going to try a different approach for some of its Long Island, NY customers. They will let subscribers have personal storage space on the company’s central server. The company expects to charge less per month than they do now for a separate DVR.

In effect, this will give the customers the ability to build a personal library of “on-demand” programs. Some analysts predict that there may be challenges over copyright issues; consumers have the right to make recordings at home to time shift their viewing, but this storage would be provided by a centralized commercial service.

My guess is that this could be a predictor of where we’re headed. Centralized storage is inexpensive and makes a lot of sense; look at the free GMail accounts with more than 2 GB of storage. We’re entering an era where bandwidth is more expensive than storage, and the price for even that is plummeting. So who cares if your recorded shows are in a box in your living room, or somewhere down the line? If it’s easier to use, has more capacity, and costs less than having your own equipment, I expect that it will be a winner.

Q: Is the [name omitted] 37-inch LCD HDTV any good? Should I buy one?
Frank Noweder

A: This is a reasonable question to ask, but it’s one that I can’t answer. In order to be able to tell you how good a given HDTV model is, I’d have to be able to compare it to everything else that is available. In2005, manufacturers released more than 850 new models of LCD and plasma televisions and monitors 30-inches or larger. Even if I could get them to loan me one of each of them, I’d have to test three a day to get through them all. I wouldn’t get any other work done, and I don’t know of a working business model that would pay for all that time. And that’s not counting the rear-projection and front-projection models.

And even if I had the time to do all the testing, and write up all the reviews in a way that was meaningful and useful to people, most of it would be wrong in a very short time. Prices change, models get discontinued, and what was good this week might be average by comparison with new products that come out a month later. So there would be an endless cycle of trying to update the old information while trying to stay current with all the new models.

The bottom line is that it can’t be done. But there’s a better way. How do you buy a car? You probably do some research to see what’s available, and you may read reviews about what’s reliable. But in the end, you go to the showrooms, and you sit in the seats and twiddle with the dashboard controls. And when you’ve narrowed it down to a few choices, you take the for a test drive to find out how you like the performance: handling, acceleration, road noise, braking, and so on.

I recommend that you do the same thing for buying HDTV. You’re likely to buy from a local store anyway, so you’ll probably buy one of the models that they have available. What you need is to know how to look at the displays in the store in much the same way that you look at the cars in the showroom. You need to learn what the key performance features are that will have the most impact on your viewing experience, and how to evaluate them for yourself in the store. You also need to understand how the store conditions – lighting, signal, setup, and the like — can make a given model look better or worse than it will in your livingroom.

You’re going to spend a lot of money on your HDTV purchase, and you’re going to live with that choice for many years. Don’t let someone else spend your money for you; learn what you need to know to get the best HDTV for your needs.

If you want to learn how to evaluate HDTVs for yourself, and get the best bang for your buck, check out Professor Poor’s Guide to Buying HDTV.

Europe looks to be the bellwether in digital entertainment once again. Both Universal Picture and Warner Brothers have announced plans to make major movies available for download at the same time as the DVD version is released for retail sales. The studios hope that this approach will help stem the tide of piracy, just as pay-for-download services such as iTunes have transformed the music industry.

Unlike other services that only let you “rent” a downloaded movie, you get to “own” these downloaded versions. This means that you can watch them again and again, whenever you want. “Digital rights management technology” — better known as “copy protection” — will prevent buyers from distributing copies of the movies that they purchase.

Digital distribution has some important advantages (which is why I distribute Professor Poor’s Guide to Buying HDTV electronically). Manufacturers do not have to maintain expensive physical inventories, and customers get nearly instantaneous delivery without relying on postal or shipping services. The European market has some important differences from the United States, but these experiments will be important to watch as they may point the way toward movie distribution for U.S. consumers before long.

Microsoft made the news this week over a new deal with Germany’s Deutsche Telekom. Starting this summer, Microsoft TV software will be used to deliver television programming and video on demand over a VDSL Internet Protocol network. According to a Reuters report, the service is scheduled to be available in 50 German cities by the end of 2006, and the company forecasts 1 million users by the end of 2007. The VDSL network is expected to make data speeds up to 50 megabits per second possible.

Sources at Microsoft point to inexpensive set top boxes that are due to come to market this year, which will make it easy to access IPTV from a television without the need for a separate computer.

IPTV is clearly gaining momentum worldwide. Microsoft TV already has a deal with AT&T, which is part of the company’s Lightspeed video service that started testing in San Antonio last December. IPTV offers some distinct advantages over cable and satellite broadcasts, and as the phone companies pursue “triple-play” configurations more aggressively, IPTV could become a common feature in homes worldwide.

Sony recently made it official and announced delays in their Blu-ray drive shipments. Now the other shoe has dropped, and the HD DVD camp has a delay of their own. Warner Home Video was supposed to ship the first HD DVD titles last week, but that’s now put off until April. And only three of the original 20 will ship then, with the remainder appearing in subsequent weeks. Warner also plans to start shipping Blu-ray titles in July.

Warner still projects that high-definition DVD players will sell twice as fast as the original DVD players did in their first year, reaching 600,000 units by the end of the year. This does not include game consoles — Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 — that could push the total into the millions.

I’m still not holding my breath for the arrival of any of these products; delay is the tradition in the optical disc market. And I definitely won’t be rushing out to be the first one to buy one when they do get here. I think we’re going to need some time to figure out just which way the wind blows on this one.

Who says that there’s not enough HDTV programming out there? VOOM HD Networks has an HD channel just for gamers. Gameplay HD is available on the DISH Network, and features original programming, coverage of gaming tournaments, and news about the gaming world that include a show produced by CNET Network’s GameSpot.

This leads me to two related points. First, the new PC and console games support high-definition graphics that get more cinematic with each iteration. Many of the hard-core gamers are in the single-male, 20-to-30 demographic, and they have some disposable cash (or available credit) to burn. I expect that these folks are going to be a noticeable factor in the large HD screen market. How soon will we see a display tricked out with gamer-centric decorations, much as Alienware has done for PC cases?

And my other point is narrowcasting is becoming a reality. As the number of channels proliferate — HD and otherwise — we have room in the bandwidth to provide programming for a much smaller audience than the major broadcast networks require. Television is changing right before our eyes!

Will 1080i sources look a lot better on the 1080p TV? Will DVDs and SD TV actually look better on the 720p TV? While I will watch some HDTV and DVD movies, the majority will be SD, as that is what is currently available.
Matt Simmons

1080i should look better on a 1080p display than on a 720p display. The 720p display must scale the image, losing data in the process. The 1080p display can combine the two 1080i interlaced fields to create a single, high-resolution image that will have more detail. Unfortunately, some early 1080p models only show one 1080i field — expanding the 540 lines to fill the screen by doubling — and throwing away the other field. The “right” way is referred to as “weaving” and the throw-away method is called “bob” by some. So a good 1080p display will show 1080i content better than a 720p display, but some 1080p displays could be the worst.

DVDs and progressive scan images can look much better on high-res screens. They can’t create the missing data required to fill out the extra pixels, but some do a remarkable job of scaling the data so it appears that you have more detail. This is often called “up-converting”, which I personally think is a terrible name for it. I don’t think that 720p has an advantage over 1080p for scaling SD content, however.

I think the more important question is whether or not you’ll be able to see the difference between 720p and 1080p. You need a very large display for 1080p in most viewing situations, and the range of distance between too close and too far is fairly small. In many instances, the 720p will serve just as well. So I recommend that you start with the screen size calculations at the different resolutions, and see what size screen will be right for your room.

If you want to be sure to get the right-sized HDTV — and the right resolution — check out Professor Poor’s Guide to Buying HDTV.

Earlier this month, a company named Microtune announced a new chip. The MT2131 actually incorporates three separate tuners on a single chip just 7 mm square: analog NTSC, digital ATSC, and Digital Cable Ready. NTSC is the standard analog broadcast signal, ATSC is the new digital broadcast signal, and Digital Cable Ready means that you don’t need a set top box for the digital cable connection.

Miniaturization and technology integration is always cool, but that’s not why I mention this component. The press release states that the chip will cost $3 in large quantities.

At this size and price, I can see that the price of digital receivers could get a lot smaller, not to mention their size.