HDTV Almanac

According to a report by Associated Press, the major networks want Congress to prohibit cable systems from “downconverting” their HDTV programming signals. This means taking high-definition digital signals and converting it to standard definition digital signals. They don’t mind conversion to analog standard definition, in order to maintain service for those customers. Lowering the resolution for digital signals, however, means that HDTV owners may not get the full resolution that their sets can display.

This will not be the last that we hear about content producers being concerned about who is doing what to their signals as they get distributed. There is a lot of pressure on both cable and satellite services to reduce the amount of data in their signals so that they can fit more channels in the available bandwidth. Another story that we don’t hear enough about is how these services compress the signals – both standard and high definition — so much that the image quality is degraded. As competition grows from various wired and wireless broadband services, cable and satellite may be at a disadvantage trying to sell degraded image quality on their programming, so market pressures alone may resolve this issue.

LCD manufacturers have been busy building new production lines capable of handling large glass substrates. As a result, production capacity is increasing. And lately, inventory levels have been increasing as well. Panels sitting in a warehouse don’t make any money for the manufacturer, but these companies need to run the plants at capacity to get the full benefits of higher efficiencies. And so they are led to sell their products for lower prices, in order to maintain cash flow.

Recently, the executive vice president of AU Optronics — one of Taiwan’s leading LCD producers — called for companies to scale back production in order to reduce inventories. It appears that competitors are lukewarm to the suggestion, and some have stated that they will not cut production.

The end result will be an oversupply of LCD panels, at least for the short term. If summer sales are slow, then watch for some attractive price cuts on LCD models that plasma and rear-projection models may have to match. The holiday buying season next fall could help balance supply and demand, which could mean more stable prices. If that happens, this summer could be a good time to buy.

Q: Is it true that it is too expensive to repair plasma TV?
Ida Issac-Brewton

A: There are parts of a plasma television that can fail and be replaced at a reasonable cost. For example, the electronics are typically designed as separate modules that can be replaced fairly easily. I suspect, however, that your question is prompted by stories of plasma displays “burning out” or wearing out over time.

The fact is that plasma displays — like a regular CRT television — gets dimmer over time. And it is also true that this is an irreversible process. There’s no way to “clean” or “recharge” a plasma panel to restore its original brightness. Almost all displays have a lifetime rating, which is an estimate of how long it takes to decrease to one-half the original brightness.

Now, early plasma designs were rated for about 5,000 hours of use, which amounts to about 3 years when used an average of four to five hours a day. If these were left on all day and night, they could reach half-brightness in just a year. This caught some early buyers by surprise, and led to a bad reputation for plasma panels.

Current plasma models have lifetimes rated around 60,000 hours, which should be far longer than most people will want to keep the set. As a result, you do not need to worry about a plasma panel getting too dim any time soon.

Want to know more about the advantages and disadvantages of the different HDTV technologies? Get Professor Poor’s Guide to Buying HDTV.

DigitTimes reports today quoting the executive vice president of AU Optronics, which is one of the largest LCD makers in Taiwan. Hsing Hui predicts that the 50″ LCD HDTV will become a mainstream segment, as increased production results in lower costs, which in turn will make LCDs competitive with plasma in this size range.

This is an intriguing concept, but it takes a closer look to understand what this really means. 50″ LCD will probably catch 50″ plasma by about 2008 in terms of price, but only if you’re looking at the 1080p resolution segment. I expect that lower-resolution plasma panels will remain considerably less-expensive than LCD. However, when you get to the 50″ size, then 1080p resolution really makes a lot of sense so it is reasonable to focus on just this resolution.

On the other hand, 1080p plasma and LCD HDTVs will probably cost at least $5,000 in 2008, so I hesitate to predict that they will be a “mainstream” product. They will likely sell in the tens of thousands of units in 2008, and that’s worldwide. Compared with the tens of millions of units of smaller plasma and LCD units that will be sold in 2008, it’s not that big a deal.

So even though the prices for 50″ LCD and plasma HDTV will likely meet in a couple years, I don’t expect it to become a dominant size in the marketplace.

Want to get the best size and resolution HDTV for your room? Don’t guess; get Professor Poor’s Guide to Buying HDTV and be sure.

On Wednesday, March 29, I wrote about Cablevision’s plan to let subscribers “record” shows to a central server, and then watch them when they want. At the time, I pointed out that some analysts thought that this might lead to lawsuits by the content producers.

Well, the show has dropped. An Associated Press report indicates that Hollywood studios and TV networks have filed suit to halt the service. The studios say that this does not fit the requirements for “fair use” of copyrighted material, and requires a separate license and fees. Cablevision apparently takes the position that customers are allowed to “time-shift” broadcast programming, and where the data is stored is not relevant.

This will be an interesting one to watch, as it could have a major impact on the type of services that cable and IPTV operators will provide in the future. It’s too early to handicap a winner on this one.

Last week, Panasonic announced plans to include DivX support in two DVD video recorders: the DMR-EH55S and the DMR-EH75VS. Both will have HDMI connectors, and are capable of up-converting output to a 1080i resolution signal. Both have hard disk drives, and have red laser DVD burners. The new recorders are expected to ship end of May or in June. The DMR-EH55S has a 200 GB hard drive and will sell for $500 or less.

It’s not clear yet whether you’ll be able to record using the DivX codec, and whether you can record HD content with it. If this turns out to be true, it would add another data point to my prediction that we may use DivX and other MPEG 4 variants to bypass the blue laser wars of HD DVD and Blu-ray entirely. The DMR-EH55S is priced about the same as Toshiba’s entry-level HD DVD player, and half the expected price of a Blu-ray recorder. It doesn’t seem like much of a contest, but we’ll see in a month or so when these become available.

I’ve been watching as CompUSA keeps giving more floor space to LCD and plasma and rear-projection TVs, but the latest news is that Radio Shack is jumping on the HDTV bandwagon. This reverses the move in 2002 that dropped televisions in favor of smaller consumer electronics devices. Radio Shack plans to phase in the new strategy over the next few years, as it will take a lot of inventory just to place samples in all of the company’s 7,400 stores around the country.

Some analysts are concerned that the average Radio Shack store is too small to offer sufficient space to display large TVs, and to offer enough choices. The company plans to limit store inventory to 32-inch and smaller models, though larger models will be available through online shopping.

As prices continue to fall, and demand for the 40-inch and larger models increase, I have to wonder about Radio Shack’s plans to limit the size in the stores, but they have to do something to respond to the space limitations. Models 35-inches and larger are projected to amount to more than a third of all sales, and competitive pressures will drive profit margins down on the smaller sizes. Maybe there will be enough for Radio Shack to make a meal on, but it doesn’t look like a sure win strategy from this vantage point.

Want to know the best size HDTV for your room? The only place to get an easy, one-number calculation that takes resolution into account is Professor Poor’s Guide to Buying HDTV.

I’ve written here often about the question of who is going to pay for published video content. The traditional broadcast commercial model breaks down as people shift to other distribution sources, and use recorded video to time- and place-shift their viewing of the content. One of the biggest challenges is the fact that TiVo and other digital video recorders (DVRs) make it easy to skip the commercials. According to some reports, the number of people viewing broadcast commercials is plummetting.

General Electric has undertaken an interesting experiment specifically aimed at luring viewers to the company’s broadcast commercials. It’s called the One Second Theater, and you can find out more about it online. I actually stumbled across this while skipping commercials on our home DVR.

The One Second Theater stores a number of still images as individual frames in a standard commercial. At 30 frames per second, the dozen or so screens flash by so fast you may not even notice them. But pause your DVR at the right moment, and you can step through them frame by frame. (And if you don’t want to struggle with finding the right frames on the DVR, you can just go online and read the content there.)\

GE’s content is amusing but hardly compelling. I don’t expect that I’ll be checking weekly to see if they have posted any new installments. But the idea is intriguing; hide content and make it more difficult to view, rather than easier. Maybe viewers will want to put in the extra effort to find the “secret” content. I expect that the content could be made more compelling; hide special discount information, or make limited edition products available just through a special order number. And these frames could be hidden in the program content, not just in commercials, as a new form of “invisible” product placement that would cause people to search for them with their DVRs, as sort of a treasure hunt.

Maybe Max Headroom’s blipverts have finally arrived!

The DISH Network satellite television service announced Wednesday that they are adding local HDTV channels in 11 markets, which nearly doubles the number of cities and now reaching a total of 24. The new cities are Dallas; Houston; Miami; Phoenix; Portland, Ore.; Sacramento; San Antonio; San Diego; San Francisco; Seattle; and Spokane. They plan to make local HD coverage available to more than half of US households by the end of 2006.

The company’s HD offerings also include ESPN2 HD, Universal HD, and five original VOOM HD channels. According to the company, they offer subcribers more than 1,700 hours of HD programming every week on 23 channels.

The whole idea of providing local station content in HD is important, as far as I’m concerned, and I think DISH Network is on the right track with this. And while I knew that there was lots of HD programming available already, the 1,700 hours a week does take me by surprise. That’s an average of more than 70 hours per 24 hour day (though I expect that some of the programming will be concentrated on the weekends, due to sports coverage). I suspect that even I could find an hour or two of programming that I’d want to watch out of that 70.

Plasma and direct-view LCDs use glass substrates. Glass is relatively fragile, and the sheets used in LCD panel production are special and expensive. So manufacturers are searching for alternatives. One problem for LCDs and OLEDs is that they require a semiconductor layer on the substrate in order to create the transistors that will switch the pixels on and off. Amorphous silicon is used almost universally, and plastic substrates generally are not suitable for this coating.

The Mitsubishi Chemical Group Science and Technology Research Center has announced the development of a new coating that can be disolved in a liquid and coated on a variety of substrates other than glass. It also has about the same semiconductor properties as amorphous silicon, so it should work with existing display technologies. And it can be patterned using lasers, rather than the expensive and tricky photolithography masks used on amorphous silicon on glass substrates. This could result in lower fabrication costs.

It will be a while before this new technology could have any impact. Target use in “practical” applications is not until the end of 2008. But it’s developments like this that will make the next generations of television displays possible.