I was visiting an acquaintance the other night. I don’t dare call him a friend yet. Keep reading and you’ll find out why!
After dinner, this acquaintance invited me downstaors to see his “home theater.” Let me say that I am always excited to see what makes others excited, and I am not one of those “snobbish” type of people who will chastize you for owning cars, gear or anything else that is less than your perceived value in the social marketplace.
I am however, blunt, if not honest and the first thing I noticed, as most people do, was a rather large TV. 73″ Big Screen TV, which was more than adequate for a room this size. The problem became noticeable only when he started a movie. The audio was horrible! The only thing running through my mind was HOW could this have happened to this poor man?
He finished this rather loud, distorted and hollow sounding demo and said “What do you think? Awesome Huh?” I Hate Conflict and as such will go to great lengths to avoid it, so I said “Yes, it sure was.” With that, I asked him if he would have time to stop over and see my home theater anytime soon and we had lunch the following day.
I took him downstairs and had a 100″ front projector hooked up through my California Audio Labs amplifiers and Soliloquy Loudspeakers. I played him a demonstration of the 100″ projector, but I used a cheesy home theater in a box type of loudspeaker and receiver package. At the end of the demo he asked “was that projector set-up expensive?” “Of course” I told him, “but it’s worth it isn’t it?” He said “Yes” and then I asked him if he had one more minute to hear something really cool?
I connected the 13″ monitor I had stashed for sporting events on multiple channels, to a DVD player and ran the digital audio out of the DVD to the big audio system. I played the same demo, but this time the result was significantly different! My now friend Jim exclaimed: “Holy Expletive! That was one kickass demo!” I replied: “you didn’t mind the small TV?” He said: “just a little.
I said: “that’s beacuse you haven’t used your imagination in a while! In the past your imagination is what painted the visual image and the better the sound and atmosphere, the more real those images became.”
When music was just two channels, we had to use our imagination to paint an image in our minds of what we really wanted to experience or thought we were hearing. When sound became multi-channel it immersed us further into the experience and we had to use our imagination less. Finally, we added High Definition images that are extremely large and our imagination went away.
It is important to remember that audio products are more than 70% of the overall experience and the core of your budget should be allocated here. Talk with someone who knows good audio and don’t sacrifice their just to get a bigger picture. Don’t stop using your imagination!
So far this year we have had 16 placements run in print and on the Web, and have 20 more in the works. Thanks for all the support from you and your members!
David Berman - Director of Training & Public Relations for HTSA speaks out about some of the recent events that have taken place in the CE industry and why consumers are being misinformed when it comes to flat panel!
It continually amazes me that after some thirty years in the consumer electronics business, people still get sucked into believing the marketing hype instead of reality and I am afraid it is because they can’t find a trusted expert when they need one!.
Allow me to illustrate:
First there was Beta and VHS and everyone agrees that Beta was the superor format, but VHS won out. WHY? The answer is because marketing convinced people they would need that extra hour of really crappy quality video. How did they do it? Fear!
I don’t know about you, but better audio, better video, smaller tape size and better reliability, were more important to me.
Then there was CRT vs. rear projection. Rear Projection was CRT and it was superior, but people said it looked grainy and nasty; not as pleasing. That is the classic battle between performance and luxury.
Rear Projection TVs had much better resolution and color accuracy, but the source material was so limited in quality that when you blew it up on a screen that large, you saw all the imperfections in the image. Kind of like Ferrari vs. the Lincoln Town Car. You wouldn’t want to drive the Ferrari over potholes, but you also wouldn’t want to turn the Town Car at 100 mph!
If you wanted projection to look better, you needed to give it better fuel, so it didn’t amplify all the problems inherent in the signal you were giving it! Direct View CRT was a softer image that masked alot of the problems and as such survived with a significantly better sales rate. Near the end they even started putting shileds on the projection sets to make them look more like direct view.
There are many more examples of this phenomena invading our society and infecting the minds of potential consumers. None is having greater impact or is more disturbing than the battle between Plasma and LCD and the misconceptions associated with which to buy and why.
Fujitsu recently stopped making plasma products and one of the last great Plasma manufacturers (Pioneer) announced their intention to get out of Plasma manufacturing and begin to OEM from outside parties! This is the kind of dire news that drove me to wite this piece.
LCD has been outselling Plasma by a significant percentage in the marketplace and I keep scratching my head! Every time I have placed a customer in front of LCD and Plasma in a competitive shootout, PLASMA HAS ALWAYS WON! It has better contrast, depth of field, three dimensionality and color. So how then is this happening?
People have been told that plasma burns and glares and fails! Incredible, it’s fear marketing all over again! The fact of the matter is Plasma is a superior picture and is responsible for more than 63% of flat panel sales within the HTSA membership. Never mind that most of the myths stated have been propogated by LCD manufacturers.
Blu Ray experienced a similar phenomena and won out in the end. I believe a lot of the credit has to do with our sales professionals who inevitably recommend superior technology to their customers.
It is true that it took longer for Plasma to get competitive at 1080p, but nobody is watching 1080p except through processing and the processor quality in the cheaper televisions leaves something to be desired.
Remember to buy a TV for performance as you will probably be watching it for the next 15 plus years and unlike cars, which you will probably trade, you’ll be stuck with your TV~
Say goodbye to Kuro as we knew (and loved) it, as Pioneer officially announced that after panel production of the next series of models is complete, it’s ending all in-house plasma panel production and will build HDTVs based on panels bought elsewhere. The source went unnamed pending a final agreement, but Panasonic will likely follow up the 42-inch it’s providing with plasmas of up to 60-inches. Due this fall are Kuro-edition LCDs, combining Pioneer’s ultra-thin speakers and exacting picture quality standards with screens built by Sharp (hopefully this time sans-banding issues) that should see release Europe first. Other businesses affected are car audio, DJ equipment and Blu-ray players, but by streamlining operations and working closely with Sharp, it expects a return to profitability in 2010.
What makes HDTVs better than the tried-and-true, inexpensive SDTVs (standard-definition TVs) we’ve used for decades? Sure, your typical HDTV has a widescreen for a better movie-viewing experience. It has an ATSC (digital) TV tuner instead of a soon-to-be-obsolete NTSC (analog) tuner. And, depending on the HDTV’s display technology, the set is probably much thinner than the old tube TV it replaced.
All these attributes are attractive, but the thing that really makes HDTV superior to SDTV is the “HD,†which stands for high-definition. An SDTV can natively display video at DVD resolution, meaning with a picture made up of 720 horizontal pixels and 480 vertical pixels, or 720 x 480 resolution. (The vertical height of a CRT TV’s picture is technically measured by the number of its horizontal lines, such as 480 in the United States. For comparison purposes, however, you can think of the number of lines in a CRT as the number of vertical pixels in an LCD or plasma TV.) A widescreen SDTV may have an 852 x 480 image, which many DVD players can fill by digitally stretching the video from 720 x 480 to a wider 852 x 480 or by letterboxing the video.
HDTVs use more pixels to display video than do SDTVs (counting tube TVs’ horizontal lines as vertical pixels). There currently are two HDTV video standards available to consumers through broadcast, cable, and satellite channels, as well as through BD (Blu-ray Disc) and HD DVD movies. A video resolution of 1,280 x 720 pixels is called 720, while the more detailed 1080 standard offers 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. Both standards are more or less named for their pictures’ vertical height in pixels.
The more pixels, the finer the detail the video can show. For instance, in a big, medieval battle scene, you’ll be able to pick out individual foot soldiers in the BD or HD DVD version, whereas they may be indistinct in the DVD edition.
More after the jump!
Of course, your HDTV’s actual picture quality depends a lot on the video you feed it. If you tune in to a 1080 cable channel or play a 1080 movie on a BD or HD DVD player, your 1080 HDTV will show you the video as it was intended to be seen–that is, a pixel-for-pixel reproduction of it.
Play the same 1080 video on a 720 HDTV, and the set will downscale the video to fit in its 1,280 x 720 (or 1,366 x 768) pixels. There will be a corresponding minor or major drop in image quality, depending on the TV; namely, you’ll notice images aren’t as sharp because there are fewer pixels to render the image than were used to create the video. Some 720 sets claim support for 1080 video, but this means downscaling is involved. Downscaling means using a single pixel to show the information of several. For example, a 320 x 240 portable DVD player will squash the video into a lower-resolution image, usually with rather jagged object edges. Check an HDTV’s pixel resolution to determine whether it can natively (without scaling) display 1080 video–that is, it has 1,920 x 1,080 resolution.
Likewise, if you pipe a 720 x 480 DVD into your 720 or 1080 HDTV, either the disc player or the TV will upconvert the video to use the greater number of pixels in the screen. During upconversion, a video processor spreads each pixel in the source video over five or six pixels on the screen. The result could look blocky or reasonably good, depending on how skillful the player or HDTV is at the upconversion process.
I vs. P
There’s one more major thing you should know. You’ll see HDTV resolution standards expressed with a lower-case i or p at the end, such as 720p, 1080i, and 1080p. These letters don’t tell you anything about the resolution of the video, even though they tag along with the resolution numbers.
Instead, i and p tell you how the video is presented on the screen. Interlaced (i) video displays half of each frame of video at a time, with the odd rows alternating with the even rows. For example, an HDTV would show a 1080i broadcast channel as the odd rows of the first frame, then the even rows, then the odd rows of frame two, and so on, faster than the eye can follow. (This is the traditional way TVs have displayed video all of these years. If you used HDTV naming conventions to describe standard TV, it would be called 480i due to its 480-line picture height and interlaced display method.)
On the other hand, progressive-scan (p) video, such as 1080p, shows you an entire frame of video all at once, then the next frame, and so on. All else being equal, progressive video changes only half as often as interlaced video, but most recent 1080p sets increase the refresh rate to 60Hz or 120Hz to compensate.
Interlaced video doesn’t cost as much to display (in terms of both video processor price and bandwidth) as progressive-scan video. However, the edges of fast-moving objects in interlaced video may seem to have staggered edges, like the teeth of a comb. Progressive video is more visually appealing but may seem to flicker on certain TVs and judder with certain types of video, such as footage of fenceposts whizzing by a moving car. To combat these problems, HDTV manufacturers incorporate features such as 120Hz screen refresh rates and anti-judder technologies such as Sony’s MotionFlow and Samsung’s Auto Motion Plus 120Hz.
Bandwidth
The higher the resolution, the more data in the video signal. Also, the higher the refresh rate, such as 120Hz versus 60Hz, the more data. Therefore, 720p video requires more bandwidth (data-carrying capacity) from its cables, equipment, and over-the-air broadcast spectrum than regular 480i programming.
Likewise, 1080p video at 120Hz takes up even more bandwidth. If your HDTV is capable of this mode, use high-quality HDMI cables and AV equipment, such as those certified as compliant with HDMI version 1.3, which can handle more bandwidth than earlier versions.
Resolution chart provided is of the public domain.
