OT: Two HDTV Factoids

Coursedesign wrote on 2/11/2006, 10:19 PM
1. As of Jan. 1, 2006, 16 million U.S. households now have at least one HDTV set.

2. 47% of all U.S. households plan to buy an HDTV set in the next 10 months.

Both of these numbers are from a Scientific Atlanta survey quoted in Broadcast Engineering magazine.

This means there is no need to rush to preorder hyper-hyped HD cameras that aren't even shipping in volume yet, but 2006 is a good year to learn more about what's different in HD production, so you'll be prepared when the time comes.

The changes are substantial (if you care about the quality).

And, yes, there will be American households screaming in 2009 when the last of the analog TV spectrum is auctioned off towards the national debt (you didn't believe the emergency responders would get this for free, did you?), old farts who are perfectly fine with their old Walmart tube TVs as long as they can see reruns of the old classical TV sitcoms in glorious analog muted color space through standard definition horizontal blinds darkly.

:O|

P.S. It's hard to switch from watching 709 to 601 color space, even if both are SD....

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 2/11/2006, 11:17 PM
I spent most of my career in marketing. Two things I learned:

1. Get at least three sources for historical information.

2. Don't EVER look at forecasts. They are not worth the paper on which they are printed. Except for milk and bread, I don't think there are many other things that 47% of households will buy in the next year. I am totally confident that half of all households will not make a $2,000 purchase this year. This just doesn't pass the reality test.
Coursedesign wrote on 2/12/2006, 12:02 AM
You just demonstrated why assumptions are so important :O)

It has already been said in this forum a few times that good HDTV sets are available from under $500. If you don't believe it, go check out your local big box stores. The prices may vary across the country, but in the metropolitan areas there's a lot of competition to keep everyone on their toes.

There will certainly always be premium and ultrapremium HDTV sets for more than $2K, but I agree with you that those are for the top 10% wealthiest people who are trying to think of something pleasant to spend their substantial federal income tax cuts on.

Before this year is over, I expect we will see at least a few decent "smaller" HDTV sets going for less than $300, and I would bet a nice dinner that we'll even see HDTVs for less than $200 next Black Friday.

Think what you have to pay today for an LCD monitor with say 1280x720 resolution, and add a few dollars for a few extra chips and connectors, and subtract the savings from a much higher manufacturing volume...

farss wrote on 2/12/2006, 1:39 AM
You're right, LCD "HD" TVs are now nearly cheap as LCD monitors, actually I think they're the cheapest way to get a 16:9 monitor.
In any case what the public has isn't really the issue, it's what the networks are buying that counts.
Down here you can sneak in with good 16:9 SD, forget 4:3 and HD is the norm. Given that a HDV camera is about the cheapest way to acquire 16:9 it's a bit of a no brainer for most.

But then again wierd things happen in the USA, we just got two of the first batch of HD Connect LEs and guess what, they do a great job of converting HDV to SD SDI except you get two choices, letterboxed or centre cutout, that's it, no straight 16:9 HDV to 16:9 SD.
That's of absolutely zero use outside of the USA.
Bob.
Spot|DSE wrote on 2/12/2006, 8:50 AM
Don't EVER look at forecasts. They are not worth the paper on which they are printed. Except for milk and bread, I don't think there are many other things that 47% of households will buy in the next year. I am totally confident that half of all households will not make a $2,000 purchase this year.

Most of the time I'd agree with you, but in fact, the market research has been pretty darn accurate on this particular segment of the market. Keep in mind that the DTV intitiative, coupled with the thrust of ESPN, Fox, CBS, NBC, Discovery, and other major networks have people hearing every hour how great HD is, and how much better their picture is. This is seriously driving the sales of these sets. Never before has a network pushed a format like the networks are pushing HD. Industry analysts are comparing it to when color came, and back in those days, only NBC was pushing color sets. And even at that, color sets didn't take all that long to invade the public.
BTW, the forecast is 47% of a defined income bracket, not of the whole population of the US.
MH_Stevens wrote on 2/12/2006, 11:00 AM
HDTV is beginning to be "the standard" but the technology is fluid. Most all TVs on the shelf at BestBuy are HDTV but few have HDMI connections that may be necessary for copy-protected HD DVDs or BluRay, and sets on the shelf in the affordable price range are 760p LCD while the future is more likely 1080P by DLP, and this technology likely to be rear-projection and not LCD.
Coursedesign wrote on 2/12/2006, 12:19 PM
The HDTV technology is definitely fluid, but this is no different from what it's been all along.

In the 70's and 80's, PAL offered a vastly better picture quality than NTSC, then NTSC started catching up real good, probably from the advent of more powerful signal processing in the receivers. (The PAL sets I see today when I travel don't even look as good as the B&O set I had in 1980.)

In the early days of NTSC, sets cost $2,000 in today's $$$ but the high cost was partially from making the full NTSC color space visible to the consumer.

It was quickly decided that low price was much more important than maximum picture quality, and that decision led to an explosion of colored households (uh, well, you know what I mean :O).

HDMI is a robust combined audio&video connector standard, while HDCP is a copy protection technology that can be used with at least either DVI or HDMI connectors.

Most of the sets sold today are 720P for the usual reasons (cost less to make, cost less to buy), but 1080P is coming fast.

I think the least expensive 1080P sets are around $2,000 for the moment, and that will of course come down fairly rapidly.

Someday we may even have 1080P content (does anybody know if BD or HD DVD support this as a video format?), but in the meantime we are doing fine with internal deinterlacing.

In an even farther distant future we may even get synchronized sound with our 1080P broadcasts. Now that will really be something!

High end receivers have adjustable delay lines, but the controls would need to be on a knob you could turn on your usual remote to make this convenient today.

(Last year, SMPTE appointed a working group to fix the lipsync problem. The results of their efforts are expected to get to consumers soon after the U.S. military gets their first inexpensive robotic IED-eater device that was 90% effective in trials 10 months ago.)

MH_Stevens wrote on 2/12/2006, 1:26 PM
So does DVI/HDMI where audio and video run together have lipsink problems? I've never seen it. Why should this be?

Coursedesign wrote on 2/12/2006, 2:00 PM
It is not related to DVI or HDMI.

The problem is similar to what you experience when previewing audio and video together with effects processing that creates a delay in the audio or video signal.

In digital broadcasting there's a lot of signal processing, and one might even wonder if they would need to incorporate some kind of relative timecode to keep things in sync through the entire chain to the viewer's set.

It's complicated enough that even SMPTE didn't have an instant answer.