January, 2010 | HD TV PROFESSOR

Month: January 2010

CES 2010: The Big Story

January 15, 2010 | Author: Ibex Marketing

We've managed to stuff another Consumer Electronics Show into the history books (and no doubt consuming more than a few terabytes of Internet storage along the way with all that's been posted about it). So let me make one last entry to sum it all up. First, this year leaves no doubt that CES is the premier technology show in this country, and not just for "consumer electronics". The IT...

CES 2010: Here Comes 480 Hz!

January 14, 2010 | Author: Ibex Marketing

The arms race continues. When you have a product category where the competing products do not differ significantly, manufacturers must find a way to make their product stand out. Almost all televisions are now thin and flat and have 1080p resolution, so what can they do? Competing on price is difficult, with margins already cut thin and retail prices still dropping by 20% a year. So you have to make...

CES 2010: OLED TVS — Keep Waiting

January 13, 2010 | Author: Ibex Marketing

If you were hoping for a breakthrough announcement about OLED TVs at CES 2010, you were let down again. OLEDs are a promising new display technology that is widely used in mobile phones and personal media players, but these are small displays. While OLEDs would make great televisions due to their incredible thinness and great image quality, there are enormous hurdles that stand in the way of commercial production of...

CES 2010: LED Backlights Take Over

January 12, 2010 | Author: Ibex Marketing

LEDs are a solid state light source that have extraordinarily long lifetimes, and do not use mercury or other environmentally hazardous chemicals that are found in the fluorescent lamps traditionally used as backlights for LCD panels in devices such as computer monitors, notebook displays, and HDTVs. In addition, LED backlights provide better color performance, resulting in better image quality. And LCD HDTV makers are rapidly shifting to LED backlights for...

CES 2010: Four-Color LCD HDTVs

January 11, 2010 | Author: Ibex Marketing

I know that at least some of you frequent HDTV Almanac readers are old enough to remember when the NBC peacock revealed a major change in television technology. Overnight, we went from shades of gray on the TV screen to full color (or what was close enough to full color for us at the time). I still remember the first kid in our school to get color TV at home....

CES 2010: Do We Need 3DTV Content?

January 8, 2010 | Author: Ibex Marketing

As I mentioned yesterday, we will need a sufficient quantity of 3D content in order for 3D channels and 3D television sales to succeed, but only a limited amount is available at this point. But maybe that's not the obstacle that it would appear to be. At the press conferences at CES on Wednesday, two companies -- Toshiba and Samsung -- both announced that they will be shipping LCD TVs...

CES 2010: 3D Broadcasts on the Way

January 7, 2010 | Author: Ibex Marketing

Last summer, European satellite service BSkyB made headlines by announcing plans for an all-3D HDTV channel to begin broadcasting this year. Many people -- including me -- thought that this is probably premature due to the limited amount of 3D content available. Like the early days of HDTV broadcasts, you were likely to see the same content repeated over and over. Now television services on this side of the pond...

CES 2010: Dress Nice When You Call

January 6, 2010 | Author: Ibex Marketing

Skype is a service that lets you make free phone calls between computers using your broadband connection. What many people don't realize is that close to a third of those calls are video calls, where you get to see the people you're talking to. We use this feature all the time, and even have added a Web camera to the large-screen HDTV in our living room so that we can...

Why 16:9? Is There Room for Others?

January 5, 2010 | Author: Ibex Marketing

The world of displays has gone flat and wide. HDTVs use a format that has a 16:9 aspect ratio, which means that for every 16 units of width, the screen is 9 units high. Due to the economies of making everything the same format, we now have 16:9 computer monitors, portable media players, and digital signage everywhere from airports to shopping malls. But is 16:9 the best solution? Sure, it...

Fox and Time Warner Settle, but…

January 4, 2010 | Author: Ibex Marketing

The much-publicized game of chicken between Fox and Time Warner ended on New Year's Day with a settlement. The terms were not disclosed, but Time Warner agreed to pay Fox for the rights to retransmit the Fox Network programming and some other News Corp cable networks. As a result, Time Warner's customers did not miss out on the Fox coverage of college and professional football over the New Year's holiday...