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Old July 22nd, 2006, 10:46 AM   #1
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The death of HD?

I read this article today in the Seattle Times, which was pulled from the LA Times wires services...

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...tbluray22.html

Summary:
Story is about an "early adopter" who got the BluRay device, and is absolutely wowed by the performance. This guy's got the works...home theater, 110" projection TV, etc. The picture is beautiful...

Quote: The difference is readily apparent in Hunt's home theater. He puts a Blu-ray disc of "Terminator 2" into the player, and the image is glorious: brighter, richer colors and more detail.

The story then gets into "bang for the buck" performance, According to the article, HD really delivers with images over 65", but the quality advantage starts to get very difficult to see at the standard sizes sold today, even the 42" and 50" sets.
For those sets, this is a very subtle change, not like the change from VHS to DVD.
Then add the problems of competing formats AND very expensive players vs a single standard and a 50 buck player, and why would your regular family see the value in changing?

The author then asks...
"But is it $950 better?
"No way. Especially not when shown on the typical HDTV systems found in homes today. And Hunt is the first to admit it."

Later on, the author says:
"After hours spent watching demonstrations of Blu-ray, I am dubious it will take off anytime soon, if ever."

The article concludes:
"Like most early adopters, he has bought into technologies that never got widely accepted even though they offered better quality. Among those on his list: Super Audio CDs and Laser Discs.
"He hopes the same fate will not befall Blu-ray and HD DVD. "The shame," he says, "that this could end up a niche product."
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Old July 22nd, 2006, 10:56 AM   #2
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The reason this should scare us is that many of us are making business decisions on equipment purchases based on the assumptions that there will be widespread adoption of these HD players by the general population. What if that doesn't happen?

I believe most of us deliver product in two ways: DVD and the Internet. If there is no widely available means of delivering the superior quality of HD, is it really worth the extra dollars for cameras, editing equipment and burners, if no one can see that difference anyways?
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Old July 22nd, 2006, 11:22 AM   #3
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He is making the fundamental mistake of many users, not sitting close enough (or some poor 42 inch TV).

Don't matter the size of a large panel it should appear the same, as you should be sitting so the screen fills the same field of view. Unfortunately, this is uncomfortably close sometimes on the smaller large panels, and most users will sit further away like they did with their 68cm sets.
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Old July 22nd, 2006, 11:59 AM   #4
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Nice of the Seattle Times to give jobs to the partially sighted!

You can SEE the difference in HD on a 17" screen - even my wife can see it
(no disrespect to Wives everywhere, but let's face facts they're not usually that discerning when it comes to TV and HiFi!)

HD is here, it's not going away and it's the future - the claim that HD DVD/BluRay is not the same leap as VHS to DVD is quite ludicrous.

Don't worry about adoption - Sony are going to deliver MILLIONS of BluRay players into peoples homes around the world in the next 18 months or so - PS3!
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Old July 22nd, 2006, 12:22 PM   #5
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1. One negative article is not enough inertia to kill the industry.
2. We all want what we can't have, and those shiney new HD sets are the top of the list. It's a goal. Face it, we're too greedy.
3. Currently, most of the stuff is backwards compatible and will play your old media, disks, etc. You won't lose or have to give up your old stuff.
4. Eventually, with HDMI, there will be no way of going back and you'll have to commit. That old SD equipment will give up the ghost, and/or your local programing will migrate to digital or HD, and you'll find new replacements scarce, or non-existent. (Resistence is futile).
5. Viewing most SD on HD equipment looks horrible. It's a catch 22. Once you buy into to, you don't go back.
6. The new technology is about 5 times the storage capacity of standard DVD's.
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Old July 22nd, 2006, 12:30 PM   #6
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Our family has a 36" CRT HDTV. Given that it is 4:3, when displaying a 16:9 image the actual display size is probably closer to 31" or 32". Even at this size the amazing sharpness and detail of an HD image over an SD image is readily apparent. I find it hard to believe the author of that story finds it difficult to see the quality difference between HD and SD on even the 42" and 50" sets.
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Old July 22nd, 2006, 12:35 PM   #7
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Picture size and viewing distance play a huge part of course, but drawing lines between picture size and viewable detail is not valid, with the variety of sets available these days.

The vast majority of consumers (and even retailers) are not savvy about real pixel resolution when it comes to consumer sets. Case in point, 26" to 30" CRTs for sale at your average Circuit City have phosphor resolutions barely better than SD, but yet are sold as HD.

In other words, consumers don't realize there are many "half-assed" HD products out there.
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Old July 22nd, 2006, 12:39 PM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Christopher Lefchik
I find it hard to believe the author of that story finds it difficult to see the quality difference between HD and SD on even the 42" and 50" sets.
Depends on the set. There are 42" sets with exceptional resolution sold for business and industrial uses (and corresponding price tags), and 50" sets sold in the HD section with a little sticker on them that says "EDTV", meaning the pixel res is probably 853x480, hardly better than SD.

Doesn't appear to me that the author is savvy enough to investigate the difference.
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Old July 22nd, 2006, 04:57 PM   #9
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The author of that article was obviously not a DVi member.
;-)
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Old July 22nd, 2006, 05:47 PM   #10
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I have an HDTV but no HDTV channel subscriptions. I can barely stand to watch TV because SD blown up on my 42" plasma looks so horrible. Granted, it's with added broadcast compression, but even DVD's through the component inputs have a cringe-inducing blocky pastel characteristic to them.

The audio industry has basically reached the height of their technology advances--the human ear can't really hear the difference between 44100Hz and 48000Hz, let alone anything better than that. most people don't even have speaker systems that accurately reproduce the audio anyway. The TV world will have it's day too--but no way will it stay at SD. People want bigger TV's and better image quality, and HD is the next logical step. People are silly to think otherwise.
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Old July 22nd, 2006, 06:03 PM   #11
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I'll agree that SD to HD is not as huge a discernable difference as VHS to DVD, but the HD difference from SD is still VERY readily apparent and obvious. This is easy to tell by people with no technical knowledge on my 11-12" laptop screen. I would imagine (maybe I'm wrong) that the bigger you blow the picture up, the harder it will be to tell the difference because if you blow HD up big enough, it gets fuzzy too. Then again, if you shrink the image too small, it will be hard to tell as well. I think the best size to view it on to tell the difference are medium size screens.
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Old July 22nd, 2006, 08:53 PM   #12
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Sounds like "chicken little" to me

One thing to remember about reporter/journalism types is that they like to exaggerate and try to find shocking controversy where there isn't--just to get you to read their crap. Or maybe reality is too boring for them.

Personally, I think the improvement from SD to HD is much GREATER than going from VHS to DVD. Just look at the numbers. The fact that I have 20/15 vision doesn't hurt either!
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Old July 23rd, 2006, 05:51 AM   #13
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Thing is, if you keep predicting the mass adoption of HDTV eventually you'll be right, but this reminds me of an argument my friend and I had a few years back, he swore blind that Christopher Lee had died, I said he hadn't. A year or so later we had the same argument, but Lee was still alive. Now Mr Lee is popping up in bug budget blockbusters. Eventually, sadly the great Mr Lee will pass away and my friend will be able to say "See? I said he'd died..."

After all, there is a precedent for this - Laser disc never took off, neither did DAT for home audio, and mini-disc took YEARS to take off, but probably there are people who bought the first mini-disc, saying "see I told people would catch on."

As for the rather elitist comments that this guy (which one are we talking about, the Journalist or the man he's interviewing) isn't savvy enough to see the difference between TV sets, hmm, well this guy (I'm assuming Mr Hunt is our subject here) is at the very least a keen consumer, which puts him at the forefront of your target audience, even if he's not a technical specialist. You can call him a fool, but need I remind you of a little story about an Emperor? and some clothes?

In fairness, it's ony this THREAD that's titled "The Death of HD" not the original article which foresees AT WORST that HD formats will end up as a niche market.
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Old July 23rd, 2006, 06:42 AM   #14
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I think that the major problem with a lot of the HD sets are the scalers. The cheap ones turn everything in to bad looking VHS LP mode quality!!!! Even the good ones do a poor job at displaying cable programs that are SD. I am now convinced that the only solution these days is two sets. One for watching the local cable programs and then a HD set for true HD programs. You may well need a third SD 16x9 to watch DVD's!!!!! This may be a better solution than finding an expensive set that attempts to do all three of these viewing tasks. I have a JVC i'Art for normal programs and Sony HiScan that I really bought to view my FX1 output. To be honest the JVC has the better picture most of the time at half the price of the Sony.

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Old July 23rd, 2006, 07:25 AM   #15
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I think he has confused that Christopher Reeves had died. Reminds me of the time I remembered seeing a news article about the guy from the Adams Family had died, yet he was popping up for years after doing appearances etc, then I found out there were two of them ;).

The guy does have a point, the higher the resolution the less noticeable the impact. Your eye also gets higher in resolution as it moves closer towards the centre of vision. So higher resolutions are diminishing returns. What I remember from a vision book, is that there are people that do not use the highest resolution part of their vision but concentrate on a part in an adjacent region, some severely so. I feel many people might not know how to use this.

I have done calculations, and have found that about 150dpi (around 720p from a reasonably closer distance, for an emissive display) is the point where your eye integrated surrounding colours and luminance details predominate. I think that after that point, details also start to merge (less and less of the field of your vision can see the higher resolution). You notice that you have to concentrate to notice the finer details, I think people just turn off and sit back and relax and don't notice.

So, people buying higher res equipment and sitting back from it (that raises the effective resolution) may well miss some of the impact. To give you an idea, the field of vision from a good close seat in a cinema is probably twice the field of view from a normal sitting distance from a 17inch monitor.
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