To HDTV or Not to HDTV?

fishrokka asks: "I'm considering buying an HDTV, but before I jump in I wanted to get Slashdot's opinion. The demos I've seen at stores look great, but is it worth the extra money? I would love to hear some real-life experiences..." I have yet to actually go out and see a demo of HDTV, but from what I hear, it's markedly better than the current analog technology. Although there are HDTV broadcasts to be found today, the FCC deadline for adoption of the format is not until sometime in 2006. Are the current HDTV implementations worth the pricetags, especially when one can limp along with their existing TVs for another 4 years?

Re:FCC deadline in 2006

[SlashChick]

"I'd be willing to bet my house that over 5% of households don't have VCRs, and they cost less than $100 and have been around for over 20 years."

Hand over the house keys, my friend. [tvhistory.tv]

Questions about HDTV

[Notre97]

I've also been looking into HDTVs. And here is a question I've wanted to ask somebody, and hopefully there is someone here that might be able to answer it.

Which looks better, 720p or 1080i? I've noticed that a lot of HDTV don't do 720p and "upgrade" any 720p signals to 1080i. How does this affect the image quality?

As far as I can find, he best HDTV (well technically it's a "monitor" b/c it has no built-in tuner; you need to use a cable box or VCR or something) I've seen is from Princeton [princetonhdtv.com]. Thier AF3.0HD [princetonhdtv.com] looks to be the best one out there. And you can find it for less than half of the $4000 MSRP online right now. CNET has a good review of the Princeton Ai3.6HD [cnet.com]. (I think the main difference is the aspect ratio between this one and the AF3.0HD).
If anyone owns one of these tell me what you think.

Progressive scan on the cheap

[FauxPasIII]

I got myself setup with an HDTV system for under $600. I got a Princeton Graphics [princetongraphics.com] monitor and a cool chinese import DVD player from Project Design and Trading Company [project-design.com] that has VGA output. So I have a high-resolution non-interlaced signal. The player, the DVD-368PS, also has normal progressive scan signals if you decide to upgrade your TV later to a 'conventional' HDTV.

My HDTV

[TheSHAD0W]

My cable company has been offering 4 HD channels (HBO East and West, SHO East and West) for free for some time, and when I decided to add a computer to my entertainment center, I took the plunge and bought a 35" Zenith HDTV/VGA monitor. It was a discontinued, slightly battered store demo, for "only" a thousand dollars. I grabbed it.

Well, I must report that HDTV is certainly all it is cracked up to be. Although the 4:3 ratio monitor squishes some display modes a bit when it letterboxes them (I suppose to get better vertical resolution), the difference in picture clarity is phenomenal. I'd have to say it equates with the difference between VHS and DVD.

The only that really irks me about the Zenith monitor is its inability to handle VGA at 800x600, despite its being able to display much higher HD resolutions. I think Zenith might've improved that in their newer models, though.

Depends on what your watching

[Lissst]

If you have, or planning on having a good DVD collection, it's worth every penny!

I got an HDTV about a year ago and yes the prices have dropped, but then again I've been watching high quality movies for about a year now.

If your looking at watching regular tv shows with the HDTV, you won't get any better picture. One day HDTV will be nice on regular television, but the DVD really shows what HDTV can do.

Also I'm not sure if the rest of the HDTV manufacturers do this, but the Mitsubishi brand has a lifetime commitment to send a tech to your home and upgrade the software or hardware in your HDTV to be compliant with the new HDTV standard once it comes out.

Re:The FCC and their mandates can go climb a tree.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, why not consider a counter example that nullifies your asssertion?

By standing back and "letting the market decide", the FCC essentially killed mediumwave AM stereo broadcasts. With six competing systems, and no FCC mandate, consumer equipment manufacturers were forced to play Russian roulette when chosing which system to support. Most chose not to support any form of AM stereo. As a result, the market was fragmented, consumers were unable to experience AM stereo, and AM stereo became an obscure novelty rather than a major component of the mediumwave broadcast business.

The FCC's flub also hastened the demise of music on the AM band, something which AM stereo was designed to prevent. Now in the USA, the AM broadcast band is music-free. Once mighty music powerhouses such as WOWO and WWWE are mere shells of their former selfs, now "Stepford" stations for the endless blather of AM talk radio.

Local stations and HDTV

[bakkajin]

I work in the news dept. at a tv station in a smaller market. We were meeting with one of the big-wigs from corporate and someone asked about the transition to HDTV. If I remember right he said that there is a loophole that unless a certain percentage of the market has a HDTV, you don't have to broadcast in HDTV.

When we are supposed to go HDTV, we will have to buy a new transmitter(I think) which will cost a chunk of change.

Having said that, most of our equipment is already set up to go HDTV, and our sets were designed with that in mind.

What counter argument?

[Bob_Robertson]

Sterio AM didn't survive because people didn't want it. This is a "failure"?

I am looking forward to the discussion on HDTV to see if anyone has a good reason to go buy it. Is wiz-bang enough, like sterio AM wasn't, to support the cost to producers and consumers to re-tool?

Since the FCC is using force to make people change, the only producer/consumer decision is "when". This is a failure, it reduces real choice into someone elses idea of right and wrong.

If you wouldn't stand that choice being made for you about religion, why do you support that choice being made for you about TV?

Does the preference for Windows make the (percieved IMHO) monopoly status of Microsoft right? Does your preference for the mandates of the FCC make their use of force right? Maybe in your eyes it does. Die, infadel, in the holy name of Alah!

Unfortunately, there is no way to be sure what wireless communication technology would be like without the FCC, because they have so hamstrung and restricted innovation for so long. However, I have in my pocket a Japanese cell phone from 3 years ago, so small, light and useful compared to the "American" versions of a technology the Americans invented.

One reason is because of the frequency restrictions that the FCC, in their infinite and perfect judgement for the betterment of mankind, placed on cellphones.

You may disagree with what specific technology is best, in fact I enjoy such discussions. Just be glad you're disagreeing with me, and not the FCC, because if you disagree with them you go to jail.

Bob-

Re:Not worth it Yet.

[Gangis]

I figure it's about a year away from being good, 2 from being available over cable, and 3 from being almost mainstream.

The Time Warner Communications service here in Brevard County, Florida offers three types of cable: Normal, Digital, and High Definition. They require separate receivers. Over here, channels 1000+ are HDTV only, and so far we have 15 HDTV channels. We don't have the High Definition service, nor a HDTV for that matter. I'd say that HDTV over cable is already here. However, I concur with your prediction about HDTV being mainstream in 3 years.

Don't buy it.

[crucini]

HDTV is intended to prevent home copying and fair use. I looked for a simple, factual link and couldn't find one - the best I saw is this FCC ruling [eff.org] about the right of the content cartel to mandate controls in the TV set itself, as opposed to the auxiliary "POD" which the FCC had originally designated as the site for access control. Circuit City tried to get the FCC to uphold its original idea, and the FCC gave in to Time Warner. I don't understand how this particular decision impacts users; as far as I can see we are harmed by the access control regardless of which piece of equipment houses it.

In the above mentioned ruling, a footnote claims that the DMCA nullifies the Betamax case.

I will also point out the obvious: TV is bad for you, but when you watch it regularly you don't realize how bad it is. Unless you have severe mobility problems due to obesity or a medical condition, you really don't need a bigger, sharper TV. But recognizing that this anti-TV sentiment will not appeal to all, I note that TV lovers are frequently into archiving or sharing shows. HDTV is all about removing your ability to do this. So whether you love or hate TV, HDTV sucks.

In any event, it will eventually be crammed down your throat, like it or not. No need to jump the gun.

Re:Directv

[Osty]

also progressive scan DVD players may look decent on one

s/may/will/. Only HD-upgradeable TVs (at a minimum. HD-ready is the same but with an HD tuner) will make use of the progressive-scan features of a progressive-scan DVD player. Otherwise, you're just wasting your money on the player (unless, of course, you're worried about future-proofing your investment, in which case you may as well buy a progressive-scan player if you expect to buy a new HDTV within the next couple years). Regular TVs only do 480i.

IMHO, an HD-upgradeable TV is very much worth it, and at $2000 for the 46" 16:9 Mitsubishi 46809 (I got the 807, but same difference), it's quite affordable. Sure, you don't get an HD tuner in the set, but for a couple hundred $$$ you can have one added. Or you can use your DirectTV tuner, or cable box (in select markets) instead, and not need an HD tuner at all. Plus as you already mentioned, it's great for progressive-scan DVD players (and non-progressive scan DVD players, even), and the latest generation of game consoles have HD support (XBox will do progressive scan natively if your TV supports it, though not all games are 16:9, and it's also capable of doing 720i, 720p, and 1080i once games begin supporting those resolutions; Gamecube requires you to enable progressive scan per game in games that support it; I don't know how the PS2 works). A good investment, and about $1000 less than you're expecting (a $2000 TV will cost you near $2700 once you've added in a base for the TV, tax, and a service contract, but then a $3000 TV will end up costing that much more as well).

TiVo Looks Like Crap on HDTV

[Ranger]

Even if I could afford one I'd wait. With a progressive scan DVD player and a wide screen HDTV (Yes, Virginia, there are non-wide screen HDTVs. Though what's the point?) you can get some awesome pictures. Oh, and don't forget the Dolby 5.1 system. But if you love TiVo even at the highest quality it looks like crap on HDTV, though it looks fine on a regular television. I have heard that DirectTV TiVo has better video quality than a standard TiVo unit but I've not seen one on a regular TV nor an HDTV.

Re:my first impressions...

[FFFish]

No salt needed. I'll vouch for what you've said. My full disclosure is that I do own a TV. It's a 1976 12" Electrohome. No cable. :-)

KCTS, Beautiful BC Magazine, and Overwaitea Foods grocery stores [nwsource.com] funded a project to film British Columbia. The video is named Over BC [mybc.com].

It is stunning.

To promote the video, it was shown in Overwaitea and Save-On stores, running off uncompressed digital tape and displayed on a true HDTV. No artifacting: 20MHz bandwidth sent to a 1080x1920x60Hz (120Hz interlaced) professional-grade display.

Mindblowing quality. It's like watching film, but without the flicker. Amazing detail. Rock-solid imaging. Fan-fucking-tastic.

Naturally, the HDTV that we're actually ending up with can't compare. It's been compressed, so there's all sorts of obnoxious aliasing. And the screen quality isn't quite up to the pro-quality $50,000 rig they had at the store. And it's impossible to pump 20MHz of information to consumers; current standards limit HDTV to about 6MHz bandwidth, with a subsequent loss of detail and quality.

But, still, even the consumer-grade stuff looks a helluva lot better than the age-old NTSC format.

Shame there's still nothing on TV worth watching.

It's All In The Chips

[NuttyBee]

I had the opportunity to work with a company working on digital terrestrial broadcasting solutions..

Here's what I learned:

1. Signal strength matters -- If you don't have a 15.5 db Signal to Noise Ratio, you get nothing. A blank screen.

2. A decent antenna helps immensely and sometimes an amplifier, but too much signal strength will also overdrive the receiver and you'll get .. nothing. (Helps to have a spectrum analyzer..)

3. All reception chipsets are NOT the same. The RCA DirectTV HDTV receiver sucks compared to what is available in newer chip sets. Try different receivers and you may notice substantially different performance.

4. If you don't live somewhere where there are DTV transmitters, none of the above matters. And currently in New York (Maybe one still up?) and outside of large markets, there are no digital television transmitters!

Another Consideration

[JabberWokky]

Shame there's still nothing on TV worth watching.

Nope - nothing (well very little) on TV, but there is plenty of excellent stuff to watch. I use a digital projector, have an excellent sound system, and I don't have cable. Other than Junkyard Wars, I wasn't watching *anything*, and since I only caught about every other show, I was paying $25 per hour of show.

But I *do* sit down regularly to *watch* a movie. You know - not just on the the background (which is annoying as hell to me) or something to fill the gaps between a conversation. I pull out a movie from my collection, and watch it.

My projector is HDTV ready... but there is nothing consumer level to play on it. I'm almost hesitant to get DVDs for this reason - I want The Wall, Apocolypse Now, End of Evangelion and wouldn't complain about Fellowship of the Rings - but I want them in HDTV. I have the first three in that list in DVD, and I know I'll be buying them again in format X when it comes out. I'd be willing to pay $120 per movie, a la my laserdiscs, just to have them in the HDTV format now... but it's just not available.

--
Evan

Broadcasts are fine, BUT....

[Kjella]

I already have a 16:9 TV. Not HDTV, just a normal one. DVD playback on that gets to use pretty much the full 720x480 resoution of a DVD. Where's the 1920x1080p DTS-ES übermovies to play on a HDTV set? They aren't there.

Use mpg4, and the 6:1 pixel increase should without problems be offset by a 1:6 compression over mpg2, to make it fit on a conventional DVD-9 (single side, double layer) like most movies are today. If I was to shell out that much money, at the very least I'd want the convinience to watch the movies when I want to. Oh and I can live with a CSS equivilant, but DROP THE DAMN REGION SYSTEM (for you US people that might not be that big a deal, but for me it is).

Kjella

Re:Problems with HDTV

[Refrag]

Well, I don't have a better summary of what you think went on behind closed doors. But, I do have an HDTV, so I can tell you what reality is.

ABC and CBS broadcast a large portion of their shows in HDTV. Each affiliate in Charlotte has a station that broadcasts in 16:9 HDTV 24/7 (however during the daytime the programs mostly have black bars on the sides to create a 4:3 image). They both also have an additional sub-channel that is in 4:3 SDTV and continuously runs a weather map. For a brief period of time one of these stations was experimenting with running one 16:9 channel, a 4:3 sub-channel with the same content, and an additional 4:3 sub-channel with a weather map.

NBC does a few shows in HDTV. They have a channel running in 16:9 HDTV 24/7 (most times with black bars -- not even Friends is in widescreen). They also have a sub-channel running a weather map.

Fox does a few shows in 16:9 480P (X-Files is one). They have a sub-channel that runs 16:9 24/7 and a sub-channel that runs a weather map in 4:3 with voice synthesis reading the weather report in a loop. Fox almost always has bars on the sides of the 16:9 channel.

PBS has five subchannels. I don't remember exactly what they all are; but one appears to be dedicated to kids, one to education, and one to 1080i HDTV.

What? No TiVO?!

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm a busy tech head, and the last thing I want to do at the end of the day is watch commercials."

Good grief! You mean you don't have a TiVO [tivo.com] yet? I have mine set to record all my favorite shows, and I don't ever bother with commercials. Also, DirecTV has much higher quality than regular cable or antenna or whatever it is that you use to watch TV.

I hear the "but I never watch TV" excuse all the time. I never watched TV either until I got my TiVO. Now I watch several shows and tons of movies. It's expensive, but IMHO worth it. And I don't have to go to the video store. ;)

HDTV won't make it - here's why

[dublin]

I'm going to go somewhat against the flow of the technology-obsessed geeks posting here and point out that HDTV's success or failure will depend on the great masses of average TV viewers out there, not a few videophiles.

HDTV almost certainly will not make its scheduled transition for several very good reasons:

- HDTV sets are *really* expensive. They will remain so until volume grows, so this is a chicken-and-egg problem with no reasonable solution. Most people will NOT buy a new TV to deal with HDTV. TV viewership is falling as it is with more and more channels of tripe. Really high-fidelity tripe is not likely to sell any better.

- Existing OTA (over the air) TV viewers will have to use set-top HDTV tuners after the transition. I predict that when the average TV viewer realizes the government is planning to force everyone (especially those that *only have* OTA TV access) to buy a $300-400 tuner box, there will be a huge outcry and the FCC will back down quickly. Expect the race/class card trump to be played here.

- Remember that 70% of US TV viewers get their signal over cable. There is no standard way to deliver HDTV over cable (nor will there be for some time), and in any case, the MSOs (cable companies) are balking at burning more of thier bandwidth for local stations. The FCC has determined that MSOs are *not* required to carry both analog and digital broadcasts for local stations, and most don't want to. If the local stations then, have to choose between sending out their analog or HDTV signals over cable, they *won't* pick HDTV, since doing so would cut them off from the majority of their audience, allowing their competitors to clean their clocks.

- There is an implicit assumption in most of the HDTV advocate posts that HDTV will be actually be worth something. In reality, the FCC has consciously not spcified that HDTV bandwidth be used to deliver HDTV picture. The stations can carve up the HDTV bandwidth in any way they want to - it's likely that many will choose to use that bandwidth to deliver several lower-quality channels and datacasting services, for example, rather than a single HD channel. This is fairly predictable, since there's more money in several smaller chunks of bandwidth than one big one.

- The technological complexity that HDTV throws into the already overly complex interconnections of DVD players, VCRS, cable tuner boxes, satellite receivers, etc. is not to be overlooked. Most people (even many geeks, from what I've seen) do *not* have the skills required to figure out how everything *should* be connected, and even if correctly connected, the devices themselves don't lend themselves to quick or easy reconfiguration during viewing. The simple fact that hooking up more than two sources to the average TV is a major PITA will keep many away.

- Another ugly secret of HDTV today is that (in almost all cities today), if you want it, you'll have to re-enter the wild and wooly world of TV antennas in order to receive your local HDTV broadcast. This is the ugly secret of the HDTV industry - there are almost no cable systems that can deliver HDTV signals. Don't confuse "Digital Cable", which is just the regular NTSC stuff with MPEG encoding and a digital conditional access system (CAS) with delivery of HDTV over cable. They are very different. In almost all areas of the country today, you have only two options for receiving an HDTV signal: Broadcast antenna, or the few channels that are available via satellite, if you have a new enough box/dish and deep pockets for programming.

- Further, the lack of off-line HDTV video sources (videotapes, discs, etc.) is another crippling blow. 16:9 is nice, but not enough to drive most people to HDTV. The MPAA and its ilk are not likely to allow HD media anytime soon, so don't expect to use that capability you paid for except as noted above.

All in all, HDTV is *far* too expensive, troublesome, and immature to reach the market penetration it *must* achieve to be successful. Personally, I laugh at people paying thousands of dollars for technology that will be obsolete by the time they get a chance to use it.

My call: HDTV will remain an expensive toy for several years, and the FCC will back off from its timetable once the general populace realizes it's being railroaded, leaving the industry in a shambles. It is possible, although not entirely likely, that HDTV will wither away entirely at that time, replaced by HD-over-IP standards that avoid the problems of HDTV entirely. I wouldn't buy any HDTV gear for another several years in any case, even if there were anything out there worth watching.

(As an aside, one of the more interesting (and terrifying, for the industry) possible outcomes of the FCC sticking to its guns and forcing analog off the air would be a wholesale exodus of people simply deciding that they can easily live without TV at all given the cost in both dollars and aggravation to go through with the "upgrade". Forced upgrades are likely to work even less well here than in the Microsoft world. If these people started reading old books again instead, HDTV could turn out to be a very good thing for society... ;-) )