[opendtv] Re: News: If There's a High-Definition TV in Your Future, Wait Till

  • From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2007 07:17:12 -0400

At 5:51 PM -0400 8/25/07, Albert Manfredi wrote:

Craig Birkmaier wrote:


Thus it appears that at least 2/3's of U.S. homes may eventually buy
displays that are not capable of delivering the HDTV viewing
experience. This is not good news for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD...
37" and larger TVs can show a real difference in image quality between SD and HD source material. Not only that, but if they are also used for games and for Internet TV, which involves web browsing, then they would clearly benefit from resolutions beyond simple VGA or 480i, which is even less than VGA.
I don't know exactly what this "HDTV experience" means to you, but to me, it makes sense to feed these displays with image quality beyond 480i. If 2/3 of US households can make use of that quality in the near future, I'd say that's "mainstream." 

I never said anything about 480i... We all know that Interlace sucks.
Standard Definition DVD is far better than 480i, and approached 480P when the source is 24P film. I am not saying that one cannot achieve even better 480P at 60P or that SD DVDs deliver the maximum vertical detail possible. But movies are not about resolution. Even Doug admits that the film content looks softer in HD than live HD video such as sports.
There is plenty of additional resolution that can be delivered with properly encoded 480P source, and we could deliver even more if we increased the horizontal resolution to around 100 samples per line...but we've been through this too many times over the years.
The real issue with 40 inch displays is the preferred viewing distance. If you are willing to sit five feet from the screen, you will see the difference between 480P and 720P - by the way Doug you would NOT see any improvement with Blu-Ray on a 40 inch screen at five feet, unless you are looking at one of their demo discs where the purposely blur the SD-DVD content. The problem is that the vast majority of consumers will not sit five feet from a 40 inch display - 7-10 feet is typical.
As to the new DVD formats, oh well. They didn't exactly make it easy for consumers to love them, what with their inability to create a single standard. Regular DVD, with its 10 Mb/s peak bandwidth, is plenty good enough for the time being, on a good deinterlacing display, IMO. 

Why use a de-interlacing display. Get a DVD player with progressive output.
The main point i was trying to make by posting the article and comment is that the Average Consumer who buys an HD capable display will have little use for one of the HD disc formats.
For what it is worth, I am happy to let the broadcasters waste their bandwidth on 720P. It is in the world of downloaded content that 480/576P will get a strong foothold. The 480 x 320 stuff on my iPhone looks outstanding. 

Regards
Craig


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