March, 2006 | HD TV PROFESSOR

Month: March 2006

UDC Foils Flexible OLED

March 17, 2006 | Author: Ibex Marketing

Flexible displays remain an elusive but appealing concept. Universal Display Corporation is one of the leading developers of OLED technology, and they recently demonstrated a display fabricated on metal foil. OLEDs emit light like a standard picture-tube CRT television, so there are no viewing angle limitations or pixel response speed problems that you get with LCDs. The problem is that the OLED materials are destroyed by water vapor or oxygen,...

VESA Hangs Up Bigger HDTVs

March 16, 2006 | Author: Ibex Marketing

VESA, the Video Electronics Standards Association, came into being to solve some thorny compatibility problems in the computer display business. Over the years, the group has managed to create standards -- and make them stick -- in a variety of areas from resolutions to cable connectors to flat panel testing. One quiet standard is the FPMI: Flat Display Mounting Interface standard. This is the common denominator that has made it...

Downs and Ups of LCoS HDTV

March 15, 2006 | Author: Ibex Marketing

CORRECTION: I made an error and said it was JVC dropping their LCoS, when in fact it is LG (as I correctly wrote about before). I have fixed this post, and appreciate all the messages from the readers who caught my mistake. Thanks! Last week, I wrote about LG dropping their new LCoS rear-projection televisions from their line-up. Now Syntax-Brillian has announced an expansion of their business. They are forming...

Users Want IPTV

March 14, 2006 | Author: Ibex Marketing

A survey of Internet users shows that they are interested in getting video content from the Internet. A third expressed interest in Google Video and more than 40 percent found Yahoo! Go to be appealing. Most wanted to view content on a computer or laptop, but nearly as many wanted to use a television. An iPod or other cell phone rated much lower. I might have been more skeptical about...

HDTV on the BIG Screen

March 13, 2006 | Author: Ibex Marketing

Do you want a really big HDTV image? If you're in Las Vegas this week, maybe you can get into the NEC exhibit at the ShoWest 2006 conference at the Bally's and Paris Hotels. The company will be showing their STARUS line of projectors. The top of the line unit is capable of displaying an image 49 wide or wider. Oh, and that's 49 feet, not inches. These are DLP...

Another Stumble for LCoS

March 10, 2006 | Author: Ibex Marketing

LCoS is the technology that Raymond Soneira of DisplayMate Technologies has picked as the new gold standard for display quality. The success of Sony's SXRD rear-projection models certainly indicates that a lot of people agree with him. JVC's D-ILA and Syntax-Brillian's LCoS displays also look great. But the road is not smooth for LCoS technology. Intel made a big noise about entering the field, and then quietly left before the...

Who Needs Blue Lasers?

March 9, 2006 | Author: Ibex Marketing

I've said before that improved compression such as MPEG4 H.264 make it possible -- even practical -- to put high-definition full-length movies on a standard red-laser DVD. The complaint from the movie houses is that this doesn't leave enough room for all the other things (that I don't watch) such as director's commentary, alternate scenes, cut scenes, scenes edited differently, documentaries about the food caterers, and home movies of the...

Happy Camper!

March 8, 2006 | Author: Ibex Marketing

Okay, I know it's not polite to gloat, especially in a setting such as this where I control the content. But something happened last Saturday that made me very happy. As I walked down to the mailbox, I saw two big trucks out on the street, with a giant spool of cable between them. I asked one of the workers what type of cable they were stringing on the poles,...

Watching the Tiny Screen

March 7, 2006 | Author: Ibex Marketing

I've been one of the skeptics about television on cell phones. A big one. And once again, it appears that the world is only too happy to prove me wrong. Insight Media's Ken Werner reported in last Friday's "Daily Outlook" that a Nokia-sponsored in England shows that people love to watch the telly on their mobile (as they'd say over there). Half of the people who watched their phones did...

More Bad News for Blu-ray

March 6, 2006 | Author: Ibex Marketing

A number of sources are reporting on an internal memo from LG Electronics that cites plans to drop the BD199 Blu-ray DVD player from the company's list of products to be released this spring. The memo reportedly indicates that the company may develop a dual-format high-definition DVD player, but that would be much later in the year. It's hard not to pile on poor Blu-ray in the light of this...