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Television Media

Widescreen TVs in the US? 270

Posted by Cliff from the what-is-going-on? dept.
Steeldrivin asks: "What's up with widescreen TV, in the US? If you go to the widescreen TV website for Philips, you'll see that they have a bunch of cool widescreen TVs...but only in Europe. The US catalog is devoid of widescreen products unless you want to spend $10,000 for a flat-screen plasma model. The catalog for Great Britain, on the other hand, has CRT-based 28" and 32" models, that are probably much more affordable. As far as other manufacturers are concerned, the only widescreen models seem to be the more expensive plasma units, or huge projection TVs. What's up with this? When will the US get affordable widescreen TVs?" Philips' US catalog can be found here.
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Widescreen TVs in the US? More

Widescreen TVs in the US?

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  • The problem with adoption of this stuff here in God's Country is that the various broadcasters and media companies are the FCC's puppetmasters.

    The current plan is for NTSC broadcasts to end in 2006, and for HDTV to completely replace it. Consumer electronics companies like this because then everyone will have to buy new TVs, VCRs (or better yet, DVDs - read only as a plus) etc.

    However, HDTV only really seems to be working when broadcast from towers. Not over cable, and not over satellites. Broadcast ground transmissions frequently get messed up, and in the digital world, if it's not a 1, it's a 0; You either get a perfect picture or you don't get the time of day.

    Additionally, a large investment will have to be made to install the HDTV transmitting equipment, and more power is required for the signal.

    So far it sounds like it would all work out cool in the end if only the cable and sat companies would get on with transmitting HDTV.

    Bzzt, wrong. The current scheme allows broadcasters to send either a really ultra-high quality channel or several low quality channels. Now given that ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC (and even UPN and WB) have been bought by big conglomerates who have additional channels providing a not-inconsiderable revenue stream, who really thinks that we can expect to see a single good channel instead of loads of crap.

    So the outlook for HDTV is pretty dismal, and it's really a necessity for getting those widescreen sets out into the market, cheaply. (heck, it even requires people to get new TABLES! the electronics companies must love this)

    Personally, I'm waiting for HDVT, so I can buy a 160 character wide vterm, with ultra-high-resolution characters in a single technicolor ;)
  • While it would be difficult to fill niche channels 24 hours day, they can still do a better job serving targeted audience than any of the 5 big channels. Look at the difference between the way Sci Fi channel and Channel 4 deal with Babylon 5. On Sci Fi, its one of there big shows that gets good ratings, On channel 4 they can't even be bothered to tell people when it's on and will pull it in favour of gardening/cooking/interior decorating/whetever happens to be the most popular cheap show of the moment, and it gets dismal ratings.

  • Personally, I'd rather watch The Matrix in 0:0
  • >we don't have laws like many European countries limiting things like how many foriegn movies our theaters can show.

    No, in the US we have this cool rating system so tweaked that frequently we can't show uncut american made films in america, though you *can* show the uncut american films in europe. :-/
  • Could someone post a link to some of these high-tech, fancy schmancy European appliances? I mean, I have a washer, dryer, stove, oven, dishwasher, fridge, and they all do their job just fine. Why are the European ones better? What am I missing out on? Could I be saving 25l of water every week? Oooohhhhhh!

    Seriously though, does anyone have a pointer to some of this stuff?


  • This sounds exactly what I am looking for. The local Electronic Stores here in FL aren't carrying them. Do you know of any net based stores selling them?

  • My apartment complex is 3 years old. So I heat with electric and have running water and use
    a top-loader. Shoot me.

    I've also got 1.5/0.128 Mbps in/out w/unlimited flat-rate access for the price of a second phone line. Drool, goddamnit, drool. Just cause we suck at lots of things doesn't mean you don't.
    We all suck! (and I prefer ding-dongs to twinkies, thank you)

    Next time I want to live in a 300 year old building, however, I know right where to go. Thanks!

    -kabloie
  • Yeah, like the US companies will ever switch to a more superior standard unless forced to by the FCC :-) Plus, keeping with NTSC (Never The Same Color ;) means that US film/video companies can be as protectionist as they like and keep other countries beholden to their local release dates.

    PAL is a technically superior standard (to NTSC :), which most of the western world uses, but you'll never see it in the US.

    But now, the worm is turning. In Australia at least, most A/V hardware is NTSC capable. Seems that the consumer hardware companies have worked out that making hardware work everywhere is cheaper for them than producing localised hardware. I was out shopping for a new VCR a few days ago, and saw one advertised as "Hyperband Cable ready!". Something which I've *never* heard of. Even the salesman at the store had no idea what it was :)

    I can't wait for DTV. Hopefully countries will agree on a *standard* this time.


    Yeah, right :)
  • The 14:9 are angles, and would therefor describe an arc. I'm not going to do the math (i'm a lazy bastard, I know) but I wouldn't be surprised if the correction from arc to flat would make it close to 16:9

    //rdj
  • I've begun to notice widescreen TVs in commercials and TV shows. And not just the Philips commercial. Commercials having nothing to do with TVs.

    I want widescreen TV to view movies in their original widescreen glory, but I'll have to wait until the standards are established.
  • Well, of course the special effects in most books are more real than any of the pap they put on the screen in movies or television programs. When you read a book the effects are rendered in pure wetware. With any movie or television program, it has to go through many layers of conversion before it gets to the wetware (where it all happens anyway, ya know). Conversion losses all over the place. Who really cares that they were able to simulate all that stuff and make flashy light appear on a wall? Thats for rubes who can't render a damn thing in their minds. Poor fools.
  • When the analogue BBC channels show a programme that was originally made in 16:9, they compromise and cut it down to 14:9, which cuts off some of the sides and gives you thin black bars.

    ...and since the programmes are made within a safe 14:9 frame people with 4:3 sets don't lose anything essential.

    The trouble with digital TV is that we now get programmes on analogue in anamorphic occasionally when the autoswitching mechanisms break. Also, the ratio switches that occur after advert breaks and before programmes start don't look pretty either :-)
  • The current wide aspect ratio in theatres was introduced in the '50s as a way to compete with TV. Movie studios and theatres were afraid people would watch TV more and go to the theatre less, so they came up with new ways to impress theatre-goers. The much wider screen was one of the ways they competed with TV.

    Couldn't have said it better myself. Theaters widened it yet again during the "cinerama" period of the '60s, which turned out to be a flop... then finally settled on a standard.

    In the end, theaters found that competing with TV meant constantly upgrading their technology to surpass that of the average home viewer. That's still the case today. Screen size ended up having very little to do with anything except for the three main points in my original post.

  • Pretty common in the UK as well now. Especially if you're a console early adopter, or want to watch NTSC tapes / discs. Used to be real hard to find, but, like wide-screen, it's just another selling point now. Cheap to do, means you only have to make one model for the whole of europe, and theoretically, the world. Economy of scale finally kicks in.

  • The problem in the US is the lack of standards to start the ball rolling. Once HDTV comes out I think we will see a very fast adoption rate for new telivision technologies, ie: widescreen, non-interlaced displays, etc. Another problem in the US is that people are used to not spending an arm and a leg for a TV. A nice 32" 4:3 can be had for $600. Europeons are more used to paying more for new technologies, and don't mind spending $1000 for a TV as much as americans do. Sometimes this causes problems though, for instance ISDN. Much of Germany switched to it 10-15 years ago, but now they're locked into this 20 year old phone technology that can't be expanded for broadband. Europe also gets gouged more by blinkware like minidisc. The US hardly bought it, not true in europe.

    -----
  • Here in the UK, the BBC and others are commited to broadcasting a lot of widescreen content. Most new BBC productions are now widescreen, including stuff like soaps (Eastenders).

    That and the fact we have digital TV available, are driving the sales of widescreen TV sets, I'd imagine.
    --

  • At http://iiit.swan.ac.uk/~iisteve/palplu s.html [swan.ac.uk] is a very good technical primer on Pal Plus...it's old (1995), but I suspect the technology hasn't changed much since then.

    To quote part of it:

    A PALplus picture has a 16:9 aspect ratio. It appears as a 16:9 letterboxed image with 430 active lines on conventional TVs, but a PALplus TV will display a 16:9 picture with 574 active lines (with extended vertical resolution to match). The full TV system bandwidth (5.0MHz on systems B/G, 5.5MHz on system I) is available for luminance detail. Cross colour effects are removed by use of so-called "Clean PAL" encoding and decoding. Put simply, Clean PAL encoding can be thought-of as the transmitter removing the sorts of signals (like fine patterned chequered shirts) which cause conventional PAL receivers to display stripey coloured interference bars.

    There are other features as well (such as different Film and Video modes and ghost cancelation)...

    Strangely, even though it took Europe quite a long time to move to color television (granted the war had something to do with this), it has been far more willing to add features to it's systems than the US has been. While we in the US have only added teletext and analogue stereo+sap, europeans have digital stereo, more teletext channels, data services, and of course Pal Plus. And of course PAL, with it's chroma phase alternation has far better color than NTSC.

    I suspect much of this can be traced to the FCC's original decision to require that the US color system be compatable with the old US B&W system. Europe didn't have much legacy hardware to support.

  • The fact is, though, that there isn't enough content for 'niche' channels like Sci-Fi to be anything but Hobbit Emporiums of mediocrity.

    Sadly, the day when we could feel unified by our experiences as a culture (say, by all watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan) are over. Not that diversity in propaganda isn't a positive result (harder to brainwash us all the same if there isn't a five channel monoculture to force us to watch), but there's something to be said for a unified experience, nonetheless.
  • I thought all Americans had widescreen so that they could watch Roseanne *smiles*.
  • It's an amazing situation, and surprisingly few people know about it. The "terrestrial" (RF link from transmitter antenna to receiver antenna) standard adopted by the USA has such severe problems with multipath as to be useless in many urban areas with indoor antennas. (This was known a year ago, at the NAB Symposium (?) held in Washington, DC. I was there.) Digital TV (not all digital TV is HDTV, btw) really should be able to use the same paths (terrestrial RF, cable, and satellite) as used by analog TV (NTSC, PAL, SECAM). In all but the USA (and possibly Argentina), the terrestrial RF link uses a system called COFDM (coded orthogonal frequency-division multiplex, iirc) that is marvelously resistant to degradation by multipath interference. There's even an anecdote about the coax. from a DTV receiver that was connected to nothing at the far end, and someone stuck a bent paper clip into the center conductor, and got a good picture. The transmitter antenna wasn't right next door, either. COFDM is great, very succesful for mobile and portable reception, but 8VSB is useless for both of those. COFDM even uses the reflections of multipath to enhance the signal. The US terrestrial DTV broadcast standard is ATSC (Advanced TV Systems Committee, iirc), and it specifies a modulation scheme that uses vestigial sideband (VSB), with the digital data transmitted 3 bits at once (must be) by choosing one of eight levels. Multipath echoes confound this signal easily and make it unusable. (The bit rate (or baud) is quite high.) Any multipath echo will arrive long after a given 3-bit level has been sent, and is quite likely to confound the transmitted levels. Since most of DTV's potential viewers live in environments subject to multipath, they will require the likes of 30-foot towers and (likely) highly-directional antennas aimed carefully, just to obtain a decent signal. Rotators will be required if there are geographically separate transmitter antenna sites. (I posted a message to a mailing list about how channel surfers would require fast servos, and reinforced antennas and towers, and also who would be the first to have a chimney torn apart by too much channel surfing. The story was included in the next issue of the newsletter.) In tests (reported at the NAB Symposium in Washington a year ago), indoor antennas were often useless, or required locating at certain place (not necessarily convenient!) in an apartment, and careful aiming. Many apartments simply couldn't use indoor antennas. The standard-setters in the USA are in a fantastic state of denial about this dirty secret. The broadcasters are worried. If you have DTV broadcasts in ypour area, try to contact the chief engineer at the station, and see what he (or she!) says. While COFDM is not 100% better (only maybe 98%?), its usage in the UK has proven to be extremely successful. Other European countries are having similar good luck, and mobile reception is just fine. // COFDM uses oodles of narrow-band carriers (something like 2,000, iirc) that individually have a quite-low bit rate. Schemes generally like those used to encode CD audio (I think COFDM uses Reed-Solomon coding) protect the data. The receivers can ignore a few carriers, if there's narrow-band interference. Guard bands (apparently periods when there's no data) help accomodate multipath, as I understand it. // Btw, I saw HDTV on a Philips 16:9 studio CRT monitor withh about a 33 inch (0,9 metre?) diagonal, in the harris DTV truck. It was from a satellite downlink, and the program material (a travelogue, low-altitude aerial shots over Ireland) was gorgeous. Image quality was so good that it was almost painful to stop watching it. Think high-quality travel poster, not bleached by the sun, in a travel agency. After making such wild statements, I feel terribly irresponsible not to have a URL to go to; my sources have been industry insiders, including forwards from the OpenDTV mailing list, which carries the comments by Dermot Nolan and Craig Birkmaier; also a newsletter put out by Larry Bloomfield. I have saved some verbose text on this topic, though. Perhaps the best source for the truth is Sinclair Broadcasting, which held some serious tests recently to compare 8VSB with COFDM. I believe Sinclair is in the Baltimore area. // If you think Microsoft is out to give Linux a bad name, the pro-8VSB characters are doing something similar (more like ostriches with heads a foot below grade level, though). I apologize for the disorganization of this message, as well; I really wanted to get the word out, and would edit the text if I could. Currently, the response online is frustratingly erratic (must be very busy!), which didn't help. Sorry for any remaining typos! I do know how to spell.
  • I understand your frustration. I was astounded when I walked into a normal (not high-end) electronics store in Den Haag, Netherlands and found fully half of the TV's for sale there, CRT's and projection, were widescreen. If you're like me, you want a TV primarily for viewing of DVD movies. I'm a big movie fan, and could really care less what broadcast TV looks like on my set. So I bought a 40-inch projection Toshiba TheatreWide. It wasn't all that cheap, at US$2500, but I believe I got a good deal over what I would have gotten in a 4:3 projection. Gotta keep in mind that to get a similar size from a widescreen DVD, I would have to have bought a bigger 4:3 set. So, if you are looking at projection sets, you can probably find a widescreen and get a better deal for watching DVD's. By the way, look at the scan lines for the set as well. Make sure it can handle at least the number of scan lines sent by a DVD player (I believe around 450). Man, it looks great to watch a widescreen movie and have it fit your TV with no annoying bars at the top and bottom.
  • I though I would elaborate on these:

    NTSC=Never The Same Color

    This is because the color component of NTSC (and PAL) is transmitted as phase changes to the chroma subcarrier... Unfortunately multipath and other annoyances to the signal can shift the phase of the overall signal so the color gets all screwed up. This is why NTSC sets have a Tint control.

    PAL=Pay for Added Luxury

    PAL actually stands for something in German...but it translates as "Phase Alternate Line". This is the same as the NTSC system except the phase of two adjacent scan lines are inverted to one another. So any overall phase shifts will be canceled out in the end. PAL sets have no Tint control.

    Unfortunately decoding PAL requires the use of a one-frame acoustical delay line (a kind of analoge memory device), and at one time these were quite expensive, so PAL sets were more spendy than similar NTSC sets.

    SECAM=System Essentially Contrary to American Method

    SECAM is the French system. It's weird. It transmits the video information on an FM carrier (PAL and NTSC use AM)... It's generally assumed that the French did this for no other reason that to be different from everyone else. The Soviets chose the SECAM system so that their citizens couldn't watch non-Soviet transmissions.

    France also at one point had an 800 line analog television system (B&W I think)... It used 21 MHz per channel...(NTSC uses 6 MHz, PAL 6 or 7)...
  • In Seattle KCTS (one of the 2 PBS stations) pretty regularly transmits HDTV these days... And I know KIRO used to transmit some with one of the early HDTV systems...I don';t know if they've moved to the modern one yet, though...
  • Widescreen is becoming increasingly popular here in the UK. They are roughly 50% more expensive than a non-widescreen model which makes a typical 28" about 700 UKP and a 32" anywhere from 900 UKP upwards. With DVD taking off over here aswell I think that they will be better selling than 4:3 models _very_ soon (1-2 years).
    I must admit to being surprised that the US is lagging behind - at least we've beaten you guys to something! ;)
  • Well, I've bought this widescreen Phillips tv. The most important reason I bought a slightly more expensive model is that it supports Pal Plus. This is a special wide screen broadcasting standart which enables a very clear picture. I guess in the US, cable comps/program makers don't want to switch to such standart yet? I really petty you in the US, wide screen rules :-)
  • PAL systems (including PAL Plus) use 625 horizontal lines of information. Of those 625, around 400 go to video, and the rest are used for sound, teletext, etc.

    PAL Plus is compatible with PAL. That means you can watch PAL Plus programs on a standard TV (of course, you'll see the black bars). What PAL Plus does is to send encoded information hidden in the lines that are carrying the black bars. This encoded information is only readable by PAL Plus TV sets. Regular PAL TV sets will discard it and only show those 2 black bars.

    These encoded lines contain video signal destined to improve/enhance the quality of the image. For example:

    If 30% of the video carrier is encoded info for the PAL Plus video signal, what you get is the remaining 70% improved by 30%. Therefore: you get full quality picture on a wide screen TV set.

    If, OTOH, you have a PAL (without the Plus) wide screen TV set, you are not decoding that info. That means you are ONLY zooming the image to make it fit your screen. I wouldn't recommend that. Yes, you watch the programs in wide screen, but you're losing image resolution!

    Buying a PAL (without the Plus) widescreen TV, or broadcasting in the same manner, is just plain stupid when PAL Plus gives better image quality to widescreen TV owners and remians 100% compatible with regular PAL.
  • Umm, but no-one in the UK transmits PAL Plus.

    Get a digital box, you know you want to. ;-)

    --
    Froggie, who loves his widescreen telly.
  • Why is it that our only 'unifying experiences as a culture' have to come from watching TV?

    Shows a pretty depressing worldview, methinks.

    *shrug*
  • Yes, movies are filmed in widescreen (16:9)format, but is this really any better than the existing standard (4:3) format?

    Speaking from personal experience...I'd much rather view something on a 4:3 device than on a 16:9 device. You can digest the information much faster when it is contained inside a square area. You don't have to scroll your eyes (or worse, your head) back and forth as much.

    Besides, anyone who make a movies these days are thinking ahead to video and TV playback. They make sure they can fit what's important in a 4:3 area, while the rest of the scene is useless fluff or scenery. If they can't fit it all in, they play that clever trick where they squash the scene to make more of it fit in the same horizontal space.

    The only movies that truely look wrong on 4:3 are the really, really old ones that weren't planning on the television format. As a result, part of the key action is cut off or they have to digitally zoom the image and pan around.

    Any movie made from 1980 onward is going to look fine on a 4:3 device. I don't see that this is likely to change considering the length of time it would take for 16:9 to trickle down. During this period, people with 16:9 devices will have to play 4:3 content with black bars on either side or chop the top and bottom off of the 4:3 image. This is exactly why people argue you should by 16:9 in the first place...so you don't have to see black bars or cut off part of the scene.

    Clearly, it's a no-win situation...I say follow the standards that computers use. We still don't have a TV that can match the clarity of a plain old 640 x 480 VGA monitor. If the TV industry wanted to truly impress the viewing public, they would quit the @#%@#% interlacing and just display a static image (thankfully, there's at least one most of HDTV that uses a non-interlaced display mode).

    Just my thoughts...

    - JoeShmoe

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  • UK "TV Tax" helps market leading... (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 14, 1999 @11:51PM (#1612243)

    [Actually, I'm sillywiz@excession.demon.co.uk, but everytime I've ever tried to create an account it's failed...]


    The licence fee that most Americans seem to regard as something archaic is partly what drives this stuff. The BBC for example just started doing both widescreen and digital broadcasts. Few people could receive them, but because they're not a commercial organisation they don't have to justify things the same way. Having the broadcasts means that the TV sets will sell and the tech gets bootstrapped that way. The US is more hamdstrung because no-one's going to start broadcasting until there are sets to watch it on and no one's going to buy a set without broadcasts. Unless they're rich, in which case they'll buy a TV for what most people spend on a car.

    The BBC is a relatively massive organisation, it has large budgets, a worldwide audience and a remit to make the best television it can. It can afford to bear the "losses" of being a field leader, where commerical television simply couldn't.

    Actually the decent widescreen TVs still aren't *THAT* cheap in the UK. The cheapest ones are maybe 4x the cost of similar spec normal TV, but the prices are dropping astonishingly fast - especially as digital takeup is picking up. I think I'm almost the last of my circle of friends to get digital... (I'm trying to watch less TV. I can't help but think that suddenly having 30 channels instead of 5 won't help.)

    Britain also has the advantage of being smaller: there are less transmitters and equipment needed, we can be covered by one satalite's footprint. This just helps our TV market be more nimble.
  • REAL Men/Women check their posts for spelling and grammar errors before they rip everyone about their relative level of intelligence.

    Just something I "observered" about your post.

    [mutter] Flamebait [/mutter]

    - JoeShmoe

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
  • ~6-7% here in the NewYork NewJersey tri-state area....

    And it's not that we don't have wide screens, if we wanted to pay an average £750 ($1200) for a TV everyone would buy one.

    Not to mention the fact that the average American household owns multiple TVs...

    Right now, your average 32" 4:3 costs $600.

    And a lot cheaper if go for a little smaller TV...


  • Those top-loading machines stick around because of tradition. The first popular machines were like that, now people buy them because their mother had, whose mother had one, whose mother had (according to PBS anyway). And people say the British are resistant to change! Apparently Maytag replaced all of the washers in a small town in Kasas that was having water problems with the front-loaders popular outside of N. America. Result? On average, 50-60% saved on both water and electricity.

    And what can I say about those stoves? It makes so much more sense to split that big thing up in to a small top oven, and larger main oven, and move grill (broiler) out of the main oven. Duh! Get with it. Monolithic systems aren't just bad in computer circles :)

  • Big price drop in LCD projection TV (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Texas Instruments recently announced [ti.com] cheap projection chipsets that will eventually make this technology less than $1000 for home entertainment centers. Currently this technology is used for business PC projectors which has fallen from $15,000 to $4,000 the past two years.
  • If that were true, would museums be filled with poems instead of pictures and sculptures? Visual arts are important too. By showing something visually we can see what others are trying say to us instead of just interpreting what they say. By know what others think we can better form our own ideas and our own "Self."
    --
  • Go to the other side of the world, Multi-system TV are the mainstream in Hongkong, (so as Multi-system VCR) coz' people like to watch video from US (NTSC), Japan (PAL) ...
  • This is one of the reasons that I'm looking to buy a widescreen TV. We're definitely getting a DVD, and I want my widescreen movies ;-)
  • > you can buy a good toaster; not all of them are crap

    Point taken, but under a completely free market, crap does sometimes drive out or marginalise good stuff, simply because it appears cheaper. Which is why there are regulations & laws about truth in advertising, pollution during manufacturing, minimum standards of durabilty, minimum wages, etc.

    Check out the interview with Bruce Sterling at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/08/114721 7 [slashdot.org]. I think this is what he's getting at when he talks about making the hidden costs visible: One consequence of this is that the producer's and consumer's goals are more closely aligned. The interesting problem is to do this effectively without compromising the free market with too much government intervention. I don't think it's likely to happen in the US though, your business lobby groups have to much power over the Government. It's not in the interests of highest profits to make those costs visible, or to have citizens that care that thier Nikes are made in 3rd world sweatshops.

    For an example of how to do it right (someone please correct me if this is an urban legend!), there is a law in Germany that any packaging that a company ships, they must be prepared to accept back and recycle. Beautifully elegant, no?

    > A free market may suck, but the alternatives are much worse

    I won't disagree. As someone else observed, the democratic system is the worst system ever. Except for all the others.

  • Slight errors in PAL colour are compensated for by way of a sort of "checksum" in the colour signal.

    "Checksum"? Isn't that the sort of thing those guys with those big room-sized Automatic Data Processing Machines would use? :-)

    According to this TV Systems: A Comparison [surrey.ac.uk] page, one PAL advantage is:

    Stable Hues - Due to reversal of sub-carrier phase on alternate lines, any phase error will be corrected by an equal and oposite error on the next line, correcting the original error. In early PAL implementations it was left to the low resolution of the human eye's colour abilities to provide the averaging effect; it is now done with a delay line.

    That stuff was done before anything we'd think of as a "checksum" in the digital sense would fit inside a TV, as far as I know - it's all analog....

    Here's the WorldWide TV Standards - A Web Guide [surrey.ac.uk] main page, with information on TV broadcast standards; unfortunately, I didn't see anything there that said what the memoire is avec which the French SECAM system comes; how exactly does it differ from PAL?

  • Yeah, but here in the US we're glad to have actually MADE the Rubgy World Cup... well the .0001% of us that care anyway...

    Everyone else is watching those "athletes" that need helmets, pads, and rests every 10 seconds... go figure.
  • You might want to look into the Sony KL-W7000 and KL-W9000 monitors. They are rear-projection 16:9 monitors with RCA, S-video and VGA (up to 1376 x 768, but aliased down to 480 lines) inputs. The KL-W7000 is 37" and can be had for less than $1700. I'm very happy with mine.
  • You are leaving out a few details here...

    These "$3000+" plus sets are all well over the 35" mark. That's a big freeking tube tv.

    There is no point in making a HDTV set that's only 20" big -- the only people interested in getting them right now are filthy rich are need to be on the bleeding edge of A/V hardware (usually both :). You cater to the people you can sell stuff to...
  • You can get wide-format monitors from SGI as part of the Octane package, I believe.

    You can get wide-format monitors with the SGI name on them from a variety of places; Number Nine [nine.com] sells (at least in the US; their online store only sells in the US) the Digital Flat Panel Solution Pack for PC's (and I think they had a package for Macs as well), which includes a Revolution IV-FP video card and the SGI monitor. It's probably available from various distributors as well. It comes with drivers for operating systems from Redmond; Accelerated-X also includes drivers, as does, I think, the latest XFree86. (I see nothing in the graphics card section of the BeOS Ready List for Intel [be.com] about it, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there's no OS/2 drivers for it, either, alas, as, when I get a second disk for my home machine, I'd be tempted to install those on it as well, just to see what they're like....)

    They are really nice, but heavy as hell,

    The ones you installed are presumably CRTs; this one is an LCD, and thus presumably not so heavy (or bulky)...

    We set them up to run 1600x1024 at 75Hz.

    ...and give you 1600x1024 as well.

    The price on Number Nine's online store is about USD 2800, but I got mine for about USD 2200, at least several months ago - I seem to remember the list price being less than USD 2800 when I bought it, so maybe it's gone up; I don't know what the price would be outside the US.

  • Line doubling is a kludge built on top of the existing set of kludges called NTSC.

    I can live without the high definition part of HDTV. What I really want is digital TV. My over-the-air reception is hopeless and the local cable system delivers a mediocre signal. I've been inside a TV station and seen how nice the signal looks before it gets mangled.

  • My car just hit 85k miles (~135k km). If I was still in the closed auto industry of the 60s and 70s, I would be buying a new one. Instead, thanks to foreign competition, my car is just getting warmed up. (Yes, its even an American car.)

    The point is, until the auto industry in the US became a truly free and open market, they produced junk, on purpuse some would say.

    The problem with the TV industry (at least in the US) is that it isn't free and open. Its not free because the FCC is regulating the broadcast formats, etc. And its not open: I get one foreign channel (even on my dish), BBC-America, and I think it is a stretch calling that foreign.

    As for Microsoft, while they may dominate in Windows land, they are by no means in control of the software industry. They couldn't stop the Internet, although they tried. They haven't been able to stop Java. The move to thinner and thinner PCs is still progressing, despite Microsoft's tugging otherwise. None of this had a damned bit to do with government regulation or inquiry.

    I can go on forever! Bottom line, the times the consumer has gotten the shaft is when the producer's market has been protected by the government, either by isolationism or by regulation.

  • Call me crazy, but don't they measure TVs diagonally because it is the best expression of their surface area?

    Sounds like FUD to me to say that the area of a 30" diagonal 3:4 TV is bigger than a 30" diagonal 16:9 TV.

    And while I'm at it, talking about your television in terms of "screen real estate" is petty and worthless. A TV is only worth what you display on it. My 19" TV that I use to show 16:9 anamorphic DVDs (with the vertical scan compressed) is more valuable to me than a 35" 3:4-restricted TV that I might use to watch ghosty OTA "must-see TV."
  • HDTV's are interlaced... Its just not as noticable because there are about 1100 lines of resolution or so compared to ntsc 525. In the tv world you need interlacing to create 2 fields per frame for smooth framerate, it mimics film, you have two fields per frame (you actually see the same frame twice on film) without that, everything will be jerky.
  • While parts of Europe are most definately ahead of the U.S. in adoption of the 16:9 aspect ratio, I believe that we're on a verge of a large scale market explosion on this side of the Atlantic.

    I live in Dallas, TX area, which is one of the top 10 television markets in the country, and local TV stations have been broadcasting HDTV signals for a year now. The television sets are still very expensive, however the prices are rapidly falling. I saw a nice Sony 16:9 HDTV set for $6,000. That's still a lot of money, however considering that six months ago the same unit was $8,000, the price drop indicates to me that within a relatively short amount of time, we'll see these things at a price point where ordinary consumers shopping for a new TV set will opt for the newer 16:9 digital televisions, simply because it's clearly the future. I know that personally I'm holding out on buying a new TV, simply because I'm waiting for the price of 16:9 sets to drop to more reasonable levels. I have already upgraded the rest of my home entertainment equipment to Dolby Digital/DTS audio equipment and DVD (which supports 16:9 aspect ratio), so the wide screen TV is the only missing element. Once the prices drop, it will be my next purchase.

    The biggest problem here in the U.S. is simply consumer ignorance. Most people don't realize how much motion picture content they are missing when watching movies on their 4:3 televisions, unless the movie is presented in letterbox. Of course, this format has quite a few enemies as well, because they just don't understand the simple fact that the black bars at the top and the bottom of the screen are NOT blocking any part of the picture, usually. I say usually, because it is true that some films are shot using the 'super 35' process which is in fact 4:3, however during theatrical presentation is 'soft matted' to a 1.85:1 aspect ratio. It is then possible to actually present more visual information on a 4:3 television set, than what was actually seen in the movie theaters. However, even in this particular scenario, I usually prefer the matted 1.85:1 presentation, simply because the film still 'looks' better. It has more to do with the art of cinematography, than with the technical aspects of the presentation medium. As someone here stated earlier, movie directors generally want their films to look the best in the theaters. This is simply because the theater is where most of the initial costs of making the film are recovered. Unfortunately, until the day comes when 16:9 fully replaces 4:3 format in the U.S., the aspect ratio wars will rage on. To see what I'm talking about, simply look into any DVD news group.
  • Yup.. that 10hz sure makes a big difference doesn't it? But.. what about that extra 20% of scan lines that we europeans have. And those 100hz tvs that are easily produced by just doubling the refreshing frequency? And would you seriously want to do that for the ntsc? I mean.. 525 lines with 120hz? Just isn't worth the money.. 50hz is fine from a distance where you can appreciate the better resolution of the tv anyway.
  • Texas Instruments recently announced...

    A couple of years ago.

    Currently this technology is used for business PC projectors which has fallen from $15,000 to $4,000 the past two years.

    Like any new technology, the initial products are very expensive. Don't expect prices to fall any faster on these than they will on LCD projectors.

    Biggest problem I have at the moment with DLP is the relatively short life of the DLP chip. LCD still lasts much longer. And the rest of the projector is essentially the same for both technologies. The arc lamp/ballast/cooling systems will be the same, and so will the lenses. And both of these subsystems are very expensive.

    (I sell and rent audio/visual equipment, including LCD projectors. When I'm not wasting time reading /.)


    --

  • If you don't see the reason to switch, then you probably shouldn't. Save yourself a pile of dough! :-)

    However, the trends are definitely in favor of widescreen images. DVD's explosion of popularity has really put widescreen movies in the home. With HDTV offering 16:9 aspect ratios and now widescreen TVs for more middle-of-the-road consumers, it's apparent that 4:3 is on the way out, not in. Even assuming that directors make films for the home video market first and foremost (an uncharitable assumption at best) they would still be designing for at least 16:9 at this point.

    At any rate, since I enjoy watching "really, really old" movies (i.e. those made before 1980) I am very grateful for the recent trend towards higher fidelity in the home theater market.
  • European stuff is, in general, more efficient than the stuff in US. Cars are definetly more efficient due to the price of gasoline(over 3$/gallon) and, anyway, at least I like the european practical thinking better. In US everything has to be bigger and faster and better than the stuff that came before it whereas in europe it generally is smaller, more efficient and more practical. We don't need to show off the neighbours by getting a pickup or an suv with 5.6 liter v8 that is used for commuting and drinks that 91 octane PREMIUM gasoline like a dry sponge. Gee.. at least from where i come from the gasoline octane STARTS at 95 and goes up to 98 lead free.. used to have leaded 99. Enables car makers to make more efficient engines etc..

    And don't even get me started with those top loading washers. I had one of those ruin a perfectly fine t-shirt because i didn't turn it inside out and the pole(more of a screw) that sticks out in the middle of the washer basically ripped the not-so-well attached picture of the front of the t-shirt. I'm scared(living now in US) to put stuff in those archaic remainders that are supposed to wash clothes(without destroing them). How about a nice steel drum with now poles loadable from the side thank you..

    And the toilets.. do you really need to put a gallon of water just sitting in the bowl? How about making the bowl look less like a wide cup and more like a shallow glass. That thing just wastes water so enormously.

    Showers.. uhh.. never seen a decent way to control the water in showers in US. Sometimes there is one turn-knob that controls both the temperature and the pressure of the water. You pull the thing out(basically on and off only) or, worse, have to turn it to make the water flow. How about separating the temperature controller(totally) from the pressure control. Wouldn't necessarily have to use full pressure to take a shower but rather something milder AND still be able to control the temperature well.

    And the 110v electricity. With all the plugs POLARISED. Yes.. they are specifically marked for for the hot and cold wires thus letting the people designing the stuff that is connected to them take advantage of this(a BIG no-no when designing anything connected to the power grid). And then people travel to europe and use a plug-converter (maybe with a transformer if they're smart) and get electricuted because of the bad design. All of the stuff that i have in my apartment right now only plugs in to the outlet ONE way. And what about the power losses with residential power transfer.. P=I^2*R && P=UI.. Thus to deliver the same amount of power to the appliances one has to double the current which means quadrupleing the power loss of transfering the electricity.

    You could probably be saving much more than 25l waters weekly by just having a decent washer, shower and a toilet. Americans are less than 4% of the worlds population but yet they consume over 30% of its resources. I wonder if it could be the lavish way of life and the archaich designs that waste some much resources that cause this?

    Regardles of the previous things I kind of like it in US. Everything is cheaper, not necessarily of terribly high quality(unless it's imported) but still okay. It costs less to buy a big mac meal than it costs to buy just the burger in most european countries. Computers are cheaper(about the only technological thing in which US. really is the leader in the world) internet is fairly cheap and widely in use. If only they'd stop being so naive about the rest of the world and open their eyes for all the improvements they could get from us. And stop talking about money all the time..

  • Depends on what you mean by fuel efficient and what you think your going to need going cross country.

    Where I live in California there are only two directions you can go without crossing a desert and a couple of mountain ranges. Running A/C at 80 mph at 6000 feet with 100F outside temp and you may burn up some fuel. However, my Uncle in Belgium keeps driving Volvos that seem to burn way more fuel (not running A/C and BE is real flat) than any caddie I've zipped to Las Vegas or Mammoth in does (normally 25 to 30 mpg for the cads). Also, we don't have the option of taking comfy trains when we go intercity. I wish we did but that is not where the money has gone so far. Actually, the last few times I've been to the continent I've been noticing the locals are driving more and using the trains and bikes a lot less. Better whatch out or you'll all be driving Fords next.

  • This has ben the case in holland for several years now. With the increasing popularity if DVD the sales of widescreen TV's is growing pretty fast and prices are dropping to an acceptable level. A 32" widescreen TV cost about 3000 dutch guilders, which is around US$1500.

    I was actually quite amazed to read that widescreen is not widely available. Popularity of DVD came a lot earlier in the US. And I have yet to see a widescreen TV that does not support NTSC, so the technology is there.
    NTSC is great for europe too, because this enables us to order DVD's in the US at much lower prices. (although I personally use PAL60 to play NTSC discs. PAL60 has about the same framerate and resolution as NTSC, but with the superior PAL color signal).

    > ....and have it fit your TV with no annoying bars at the top and bottom.

    Well, with most DVD's begin 2.35:1, you'll have black bars anyway.

    I can't wait for a real world standard for HDTV (if it can ever be agreed upon)
  • You may think we are isolationist, but we don't have laws like many European countries limiting things like how many foriegn movies our theaters can show

    Ahem... To my knowledge, foreign movies aren't much shown in the USA... Because most theaters are tied by their *big* parent companies not to show anything that's not from the *big* production companies, as well as anything that's NG17. The movie market there is completely dumbed down as to promote quantity instead of qualities.

    Foreign movies are considered a "niche" market, and are only shown in independent theaters, mostly in cities like NY or San Francisco, where people are educated enough to understand a movie that's got a deeper meaning than all the "entertainment" crap.

    In Europe, there are *some* regulations in *some* countries, most of them being there as to protect the European film industry from the big american studios and their monopolistic policy. Without *our* regulations, European movies would barely make it to the screens, since american companies would simply push the distribution channels to be american-exclusive.

    And European movies don't suck. Many of them gather millions of people, and many of them are later bought by american companies as to make "remakes", following american (dumb) standards.

  • I can notice the differenc between 50hz and 72hz on my PC display.

    I can too, but with TVs the picture is blury and always moving, so you don't get to notice the flicker that much.

    It depends what you are looking for. The resolution is the same, there is just a lot less flicker!!

    Problem is, I don't see much flicker in regular 50Hz TVs, so I'm not sure it is worth paying +60% for a 100 Hz TV that seems almost the same to me. Or maybe it is the showroom lighting that hides the flicker differences.
  • "Fuel-efficient" in Europe doesn't have to mean "micro-car". I've driven plenty of cars both in the U.K. and the U.S., and I have to say that a good 2.0 litre engine in the U.K. will offer equal (if not more) performance than a typical 3.0 litre in the U.S. Not only that, but you'll get more mpg from the 2.0 litre too.

    The only extra you'll get from the 3.0 litre car is more torque at lower revs. Unless you're planning on towing a house behind you, that doesn't often matter that much.

    I'll agree with you on the comfort level of 'compact' cars though. I quite often drive trips of well over 800 straight miles in the U.S. (try doing THAT in the U.K. withought falling into an ocean!) and there's NO way that I could those journeys in your typical compact car. Give me big comfy seats and air-con any day :-)
  • I assume BSkyB digital TV technology works like the US DBS digital systems.

    Unlike than analog TV stations on cable, which all get the same bandwidth chunk, digital sat broadcasts have one enoumous bandwidth that can be split into a number of differnet feeds. As you ramp up the number of feeds, the quality for each feed drops. This can be done inequally, so that movies have bigger chunk for a better picture, while channels 'requiring' less picture quality--especially sports broadcasts--can be squeezed on. This trades off picture quality for variety.
  • Not only motion, but color, hides the flicker. And of course, TVs interlace to compensate for low refresh rates.

    When you watch TV, the refresh rate isn't as obvious because of the low resolution, interlacing and changing picture.

    On a PC monitor, you don't have interlacing, the picture is typically static, and the screen is often predominantly the same color, often white or light. This makes the refresh rate much more obvious. Set your Mac to 75 MHz and see if you can tell a differnce between watching full motion video and staring at a blank white window. (If you don't have a Mac, you probably don't care how the screen looks.)

    Then again, some people just don't see the difference, or it doesn't annoy them as much. I can't hardly stand anything less than 85 MHz--it gives me headaches.
  • In the case of the US, widescreen TVs are currently being targetted at Early Adopters. Also, in lots of places, there's no "software" for HDTV, so there's insufficient demand. I doubt HDTV is even being broadcast in more than 10 media markets at the moment.

    Yes, widescreen is nice, but it's hardly essential. And I can live with "letterboxing" even on a plain old TV (which looks really good with a digital source and something to filter out the Macrovision crap). I suspect if the "HDTV adaptors" are as good as they can be, few people will upgrade to widescreen.

    (Hell, I'd have to buy new furniture just to fit a widescreen in my den! And most everyone else in the U.S. is in a similar boat, unless they want a smaller screen surface area...)
  • "Maybe it's because our land mass is so much larger, so we have so much farther to go" Isn't that the strongest reason ever to have a fuel-efficient car?
  • The refresh rate of the video display is not tied to the frame rate of the incoming signal.

    Imagine trying to play Unreal if your computer monitor refresh was sync'ed up to the frame rate. Yuck!

  • "Maybe it's because our land mass is so much larger, so we have so much farther to go"

    Isn't that the strongest reason ever to have a fuel-efficient car?
  • They're both 16x9 and take S-video ins for your DVD players.. the KL9000 is a data-grade monitor that can handle 8xx by 480 IIRC.. I know Sony bundles M$ drivers with it. It's supposed to be a very nice DVD-viewing medium that should handle 720p if you get a DTV->VGA converter or a DTV card for your PC.

    The W400Q is a DTV-ready projector that streets about $3600 new, and can display up to 300" in 16x9 mode (that's like 20' wide by 1' high or something), though it probably maxes out in quality terms at a mere 130-140" or so. It has an internal scan doubler to display 480p (that's 480 non-interlaced, or progressive) scan and has native 16x9 LCDs. It'll accept a DTV converter that uses Y-Pr-Pb (or is it Cr-Cb? I always confuse them) analog signals though it downconverts to 480p. It's probably the best budget home-theatre projector you can get, and it's the one that'll be driving my home theatre (with actual movie screen and seats scavenged from a closed old theatre) sometime in mid-November..

    You _can_ get 'affordable' 16x9 sets in the US, if you're scavengy enough.. Though after visiting Amsterdam I only really saw maybe 2-3 channels actually broadcasting 16x9 PAL and I had cable!

    Links:
    W400q unofficial FAQ [thebigpicturedvd.com]
    KLW9000 unofficial FAQ [thebigpicturedvd.com]

    Now, all I need is BBC teletext..
  • KXLY in Spokane, Washington broadcasts in HDTV, and touts it heavily. I doubt there are a whole lot of HTDVs in Spokane yet, but they're trying to get the content out there to create the market for the TVs. Chickens and eggs.

    Surely if it's being done in Spokane, it's being done elsewhere, no?

    Geoff
  • Toshiba sells a Widescreen (16:9) High Definition Ready, Digital Projection Television for around $2800. I can get it for around $2100 ($2400 after tax and extended warranty) (Model #TW40X81). It operates in a progressive (as opposed to interlaced) scanning mode, which basically produces an image on the screen about twice as fast as interlaced methods. For broadcasts not in High Definition, it uses line doubling techniques in order to obtain its higher resolution.

    Due to the (eventual) digital nature of the broadcast medium, more information will be crammed within the space alloted for each broadcast, therefore allowing high definition widesreen broadcasts to occur. This unit is NOT ready to receive such broadcasts, and will require a set-top box to be purchased (estimated at around $500) when the time comes.

    A friend of mine purchased this same unit last weekend. It weighs in at a hefty 150lbs. The picture is incredible, color reproduction almost perfect, and Toshiba's GUI is easy and fast.

    Widescreen is here!!

  • It's slowly but surely catching on - DVD has passed the "early adopter" phase in the US (over 3 million players sold to date). It's only a matter of time before people put 2 and 2 together and realize that widescreen TVs are better for viewing DVDs. There are some new models coming out in the states that aren't prohibitively expensive (Toshiba's and Panasonic's lines, for example)
  • Sounds like me. I'm stuck at 800x600 resolution on my monitor because that's what it supports 85hz at (it tries to at 1024x768, but it doesn't lock). 60 hz is *way* too flickery for me (sometimes, I can almost see it refresh, top to bottom). 75 hz, bearable, but annoying at least. 85 hz, nice rock solid picture. Oh well.

    As for lack of widescreen TVs? I see lots of widescreen films around. Only problem is that in North America, everything tends to have a lot of competition, thus cheaper. However, since TV's and most other goods are shipped worldwide, it makes no sense to ship a more expensive set to a place where stuff is cheaper. I've seen it. Here, the "advanced" cell phones with their nifty web browsers and ultra small formfactor don't come out until 6+ months after they've been released elsewhere (which, coincedentaly, has higher phone rates...). Similarly, why sell widescreen TVs here? There's so little profit to be made it's hardly worth the effort (only those with home-theatre systems and cash to burn can *afford* them...).
  • Er. What US-owned TV companies are there, anyway? Which US company makes a VCR? I've got a Sony TV, a JVC, and a couple of RCAs. None are American.

    What's that you say, doesn't RCA stand for "Radio Corporation of America"? Yes, it does. However, it's been the property of the Japanese Victor Corporation (JVC) for some decades.

    None of the big-name TVs are American. Mitsubishi, Hitachi, Panasonic, Sharp; nothing you'll find at the local Wal-Mart or discount electronics whore. Nor are any of the possibly lesser-known TV manufacturers, such as Proton or Fisher or...

    Now, none of this is to say that TVs aren't made here in the states - Philips has a nice little fab near here which cranks out CRTs 24/7.

    But it leads me to ask, when someone mentions American companies in the context of TV and VCR manufacture, to whom they refer.
  • You're kidding, right? 5.5% is a *great* sales tax rate. Move on down to Tennessee, where we pay 8.75% sales tax (Praise God for the Internet!)
  • HDTV is a waste of money. The technology to improve television has been around for quite a while now, although it's been expensive. The technology I'm talking about is Line Doubling, Progressive Scan, and Anamorphic 16:9.

    Normal Television is 60Hz interlaced. It's this interlacing that gives Television it's "flicker"...

    Line Doubling uses special circuitry that examines each interlaced frame and compares it to the one before... good line doublers can tell the difference between stuff that was originally on film, and stuff that was originally on Video, then they reconstruct a 60Hz non-interlaced (or any refresh rate you want since this is all done digitally) progressive scan picture.

    www.dvdo.com makes a $699 line doubler, plus they make the OEM chips that TV manufacturers /could/ be building into sets right now!

    DVD and DSS are actually in reality, progressive scan devices, since they are digital. Most likely your DVD player or DSS has circuitry in it to convert this progressive scan picture into a crappy NTSC interlaced picture. By removing this step, we could hook DVD players or DSS units directly to monitors and television which support "RGB or component video". RGB is basically VGA, so you could use a nice 20" computer monitor as a very nice display.

    Unfortunatlely, I don't know of a single DVD player or DSS unit that has progressive outputs.

    The last thing is the move to "widescreen". 16x9 is the aspect ratio that has been adopted by HDTV. By "squeezing" a widescreen movie onto a 4:3 signal, and then "unsqueezing" it to 16:9 you get an excellent picture.

    And movie studios continue to release DVD's without converting the movies to 16:9, instead "letterboxing" the picture onto a 4:3 frame.

    I've seen the future... and HDTV is a small part of it. I have a buddy who has a Barco Data 1100 Projector, it's basically a huge projection computer monitor. It will do 1024x768 at 60Hz non-interlaced.

    I took my PC with DVD-ROM drive over to his house and we hooked it up and soon had Windows (yuck I know but DVD isn't under LInux yet) at 1024x768x24bit on the screen...

    I proceeded to put an anamorphic movie in and used a software DVD decoder program (WinDVD) to watch the movie. This was true progressive scan, being resampled up to 1024x768...

    I kid you not, it looked like FILM. I have never seen anything like it. HDTV would have to be a major improvement over this, and frankly I can't imagine most people being able to tell the difference...

    We don't need HDTV, we need better televisions.



  • I just have a big telly instead.. even with the black bars, it's still bigger than most widescreen TVs, and is a lot cheaper (although okay, it's lower total resolution) With digital TV and DVD we get the choice of pan-n-scan or letterbox, so I don't think it really matters. Until the widescreen sets are at price parity with 4:3, it won't really take off.

    Of course, we don't necessarily want a TV with the clarity of a VGA monitor... the fuzziness hides the pixelisation, especially with those crappy low-bandwidth MPEG streams from digital terrestrial.

  • >I proceeded to put an anamorphic movie in and used a software DVD >decoder program (WinDVD) to watch the movie. This was true >progressive scan, being resampled up to 1024x768...
    >I kid you not, it looked like FILM.

    You don't go to a lot of movies in the theater, to you? The idea that by scaling the crappy NTSC signal up to 1024x768 could make it higher quality is utterly laughable.

    All I can say is that if you think HDTV isn't worth it, you really don't understand the ideas of digital transmission and higher resolution.

  • Third World (Score:3)

    by David Off ( 101038 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @11:59PM (#1612309) Homepage
    Is it worth bothering to broadcast widescreen on execrable NTSC 525 line systems? Much about US consumer goods is so retro-third world. A dogdy cell-phone network, cookers that my mum would have thrown in the 50s and those weird upright washing machines with separate spin system that take up most of a small condo and need their own reservoir to fill, light switches made of Bakelite!!! America is so protectionist and isolationist that it is probably not worth Europeans exporting decent stuff.
  • Over here (NZ and Aussie) we don't even start to get widescreen. While shopping for a new TV, I tink I came across one fuzzy, rear projection widescreen, that was it.

    We better get it soon, i like it much better.
  • Maybe for the plasma flatscreens. There are regular FP widescreen TVs available in the states in the low $2K range
  • Here in Italy, nearly all shops show widescreen TVs, and some people buy them. The offer is rich for all brands, not just Philips.
    I'm surprised to see that US people do not pay attention to widescreen, esp.ly considering that we still have a minimal catalogue of DVD titles in comparison with the US one.
    Why buy sorround systems, etc... and not a widescreen TV?
  • First Americans don't have the hots for stuff made by Phillips anyway. I'd check the Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic catalogs to see what is available. Besides we're too busy hacking for the man to pay for all these stocks we're buying thru the E-Brokers and I'm still saving up to get that Harley. Whose got time for TV anyway.
  • Scroll your eyes?

    Well, if you sit less than 1 meter away from the screen, maybe.

    But if you go into a cinema, you don't sit in the first row either, do you? ;)
  • First, I have to say that the thought of saying that movies made now just have a lot of "fluff" like "scenery" or "special effects" or "actors" that can be lopped off makes me shudder... but even though it might seem you'd rather just listen to the audio track and not have a distracting set of moving images, I'll not argue that point.

    What I will say is that you are off technically - a lot of DVD's are presented in an Anamorphic widescreen format that leaves only a small band of black at the top and bottom of a normal TV, but adds extra lines of resolution when watching on a 16:9 TV. Hopefully everyone would agree that more lines of resolution are better...

    Would you REALLY rather watch The Matrix in 4:3?

  • TV in the UK (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    At the moment the UK is seeing a transition from
    analogue UHF transmissions (4:3 aspect ratio)
    to digital. We can get digital via satellite,
    cable, or a new digital format on spare UHF
    channels.

    An increasing amount of new programmes are shot
    in 16:9 widescreen (most top soaps etc) and the
    digital deliveries serve this up. With the old
    analogue system however, the aspect ratio is
    fixed, and dropping the height of the picture
    just wastes radio frequency bandwidth. As a
    compromise, they use a half-way format of 14:9
    with not-so-bad black bars at the top and bottom
    of the picture.

    It's pointless buying a widescreen set just for
    "normal" TV as there is no more EXTRA picture
    available on the analogue system. The 14:9
    stuff properly shown on a wide set just results
    in black bars down the SIDES of the picture!

    You'd need to have a digital receiver of some
    sort or a DVD player, etc. to make it worthwile.

    It's not worth investing a lot of money in a new
    set until EVERYTHING you watch is in the same
    format. What MAY happen is that if you watch a
    lot of programmes with black bars the main area
    of the screen will wear at a different rate to
    the unused areas, leading to annoying yellowed
    stripes in the long term. Apparently us humans
    don't notice a gradual change in the colour of
    our TV sets over the years, but we are far more
    sensitive to the RELATIVE differences on parts
    of the same screen.

    The analogue system is due to be shut down in
    ten years (they hope) or however long it takes
    for a certain percentage of us to have changed
    to widescreen.

    The average TV shop in this area has about two
    thirds of the stock in widescreen format.

    What also puts me off, is that to get the same
    picture height as my current TV would require
    the purchase of a relatively enormous screen,
    at great expense. I don't personally like the
    wide format! I'm convinced our field of view
    is roughly the same in up/down AND left/right
    dimensions, and anyway it looks stupid to have
    a small news reporter on screen and acres of
    scenery to each side of them.

    Bah.

    +AndyJ+
  • HDTV's are interlaced...

    Not that anyone really cares...

    In the USofA: The "official" term "HDTV" (High-Definition, as opposed to the more generic Digital TV) covers four cases:

    • 1280x720 @ 24 frames/second non-interlaced
    • 1280x720 @ 60 frames/second non-interlaced
    • 1920x1080 @ 24 frames/second non-interlaced
    • 1920x1080 @ 60 fields/second interlaced 2:1 to 30 frames/second
    Only one of the four, the one generally referred to as "1080i", is interlaced. When transmitting 24 fps material (movies and other film-based content), no interlacing is used at any resolution.
  • Yup, when I spent some time in US and Canada I was amazed to see home appliances and cooking tools that looked like they came from the 50s or 60s. The washing machine could have been the one my grandmother had after WWII ! I don't know if it is that people keep their stuff 30 years or if this is the local industry but they will NEVER export these in Europe (or Japan/Asia I guess)

  • Re:NTSC (Score:2)

    by slim ( 1652 )
    While the vertical resolution of NTSC is poor, us European console gamers are in awe of your 60Hz refresh (vs our 50Hz).

    So it's swings & roundabouts, innit.

    Hope HDTV gets here soon, and is cheap enough.
    --
  • Unfortunately, much of the BBC's "widescreen" output is in the 14:9 format (ie, thin black bars), which pleases no-one.

    Not quite true. The digital versions of the BBC's channels (as available via satellite (Sky Digital) or through your TV aerial (onDigital)) are in full 16:9 widescreen. When the analogue BBC channels show a programme that was originally made in 16:9, they compromise and cut it down to 14:9, which cuts off some of the sides and gives you thin black bars.

    Still waiting for digital cable TV, though... :-(
  • Widescreen TV is 'super lekker' (jolly good, in Dutch), but what I would like is widescreen monitors (or maybe tallscreen?)

    I heard talk about this a few years back, but have never seen anything like this since then except in a publishing house (on SGI I think). At the moment my only option to get documents up side by side is to run at eye crunching resolutions, or get a twin-head setup and buy a new desk.

    Actually what I really want is a 180 degree wraparound high-res monitor, with me in a delux swivel chair in the middle. So I can play at being the badguy from a Bond movie, 'So Mr. Gates, you thought you could defeat me! MuHaHaHa..'

  • It's not just the BBC who are doing widescreen. Channel 4 broadcast a fair number of programmes in widscreen along with thier Film 4 offshoot channel, and Sky have a widscreen movie channel and box office channel. Neither of them get anything from the licence fee. And if you think about it, most people get digital BBC thanks to two commercial companies: Sky and OnDigital. You don't see the BBC giving away free set top boxes. It's those two companies, not the BBC, who are leading the drive to digital, which will lead to more widescreen programmes.

    Anyway, if the BBC can afford to bear the losses than why does it want 24 pounds a year extra from digital TV viewers for channels (showing mostly widescreen programmes) no one asked for and very few people seem to want.

    The cheapest widescreen set I've seen was 299 (in Tescos of all places), and I think they're about 400 - 500 in Comet/Dixons etc. so they are not really that much more expensive than a normal TV.
  • Just because our eyes are in arranged in a 16:9 shape doesn't mean this is how the screen should work. Have you ever turned around or stood in the aisle to watch people at the movies? Their eyes and heads move a lot...even in the back rows.

    I think it's because...if the director has a 16:9 canvas, he or she is going to use the whole thing...and since our eyes are trained to focus on a single point, we subconciously move them around to follow what's going on.

    I can't speak for everyone but...when Windows 98 came out, the first thing I did was throw in a second video card. I used this dual-monitor system for about two weeks. The new crick in my neck from moving my focus between monitors just wasn't worth the extra desktop space.

    I'm more excited by advancements in head mounted display technology. With a nice set of glasses, I would could get the picture equivalent of a 30 foot screen, and have 3D capability to boot!

    Yes, I know the idea of two people slipping on separate pairs of VR goggles isn't nearly as romantic as curling up in front of the television but...I really think this is where we are all headed...Like how most minivans have built in headphones jacks so parents and kids can listen to two different audio programs.

    I think someday everyone will be carrying around a cheap video headset they can plug in at work, in public theaters, on planes, in cars, on their home player, or wherever they need to see digital content. That'll be cool.

    Just as long as they aren't implanting them in my eyeball...that's where I draw the line... =)

    - JoeShmoe

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
  • > if you have a choice between 10 different brands or product X, there is competiton between the different brands to make the "best" product.

    Perhaps you are defining "best" to be "whatever people buy the most of", but I don't buy that definition.

    There is competition among producers be the best producer, ie. to sell the most product or to make the most profit, not to make the highest quality, innovative product. As in any evolutionary scenario, the actors act in *their own* best interest, no-one elses.

    To make the best product is one way for a producer to get ahead, but is is often a difficult way. Alternatives are good marketing, cheap product, good *looking* product, sweatshop labour, cheap but polluting manufacturing methods, dumbing down the consumers, products that wear out quickly and of course, vendor lock-in. Market dominance by one company is only one possible problem. Sadly, increased competition encourages manufacturers to cut corners in order to compete.

    Which is why you can get 10 different brands of toaster, all of them cheap crap. Which is why, last time I was in the US, I could get 20 kinds of salad dressing, and all the ones that I tried tasted sickly-sweet.

    > they don't make em like they used to

    And this is in spite of lots of competition. Because producers, even under competition, act in thier own best interests, not yours.

  • Yeah, our industrial base didn't get creamed in WWII. We were economically dominant in the 50's which created fat and lazy companies. We've also got a lot of stodgy 75 year or older companies around that only seem to want change when foreign competitors threaten to yank the rug. Cars, for example -- change/sell the body yearly, minimize structural costs, except when pushed by regulation or competition. No vision to create a market for a long lasting fuel efficient safe car.

  • Those tiny, underpowered "fuel-efficient" cars don't sell well in the States. Maybe it's because our land mass is so much larger, so we have so much farther to go. :-) When I went to get a car recently, I started out thinking about saving some money, but the efficient models I tried just cramped me to no end.

  • Re:Losts of channels = no good channels (Score:3)

    by TobascoKid ( 82629 ) on Friday October 15, 1999 @03:11AM (#1612408) Homepage
    Not necessarily. A channel can focus down to a particular niche, like Sci-fi fans or housewives, and can give advertisers the people they actually want to reach, as oppossed to a general channel that has to cater to everyone. So while there are fewer viewers per channel, the advertisers are willing to pay more because there reaching the right people.

  • Losts of channels = no good channels (Score:3)

    by Betcour ( 50623 ) on Friday October 15, 1999 @01:59AM (#1612409)
    I think there is something wrong with having lots of channels : the more they are, the less audience each of them has, because the size of the market is still the same. And the less audience they get the more they show advertising to pay for the programs. And since they don't get as much money, they have to buy crappy programs and make endless reruns. So in the end you get 200 channels with 50% commercials and 50% crappy reruns, instead of 5 or 10 better quality channels.

    Unless of course you pay extra for some channels, but most people don't want to do that.

  • Re:I don't see the reason to switch... (Score:3)

    by Troed ( 102527 ) on Friday October 15, 1999 @03:43AM (#1612436) Homepage Journal
    Speaking from personal experience...I'd much rather view something on a 4:3 device than on a 16:9 device. You can digest the information much faster when it is contained inside a square area. You don't have to scroll your eyes (or worse, your head) back and forth as much.

    Actually, your standard Real Life view is a lot wider than it's high, so 16:9 is _better_ for digesting information than 4:3.

    The only movies that truely look wrong on 4:3 are the really, really old ones that weren't planning on the television format. As a result, part of the key action is cut off or they have to digitally zoom the image and pan around.

    You're way off here. Just as an example, when Casablanca and Gone with the wind were filmed the standard aspect ratio in the _cinemas_ was 4:3. Cinemascope etc were partly created so that movietheaters would be able to compete with the home television.

    Today, filmmakers make extensive use of aspect ratios close to 2:1 (1.86:1, 2.35:1 etc) and the only way to experience these movies to their full extent is (at the moment) to get the movies on DVD and view them on a widescreen television ...

    Before you continue .. have you actually _tried out_ 16:9? Watched a standard 4:3 movie and then the 16:9 version? Or even larger aspect ratios?

  • And WHY are TV's still hardwired to be PAL _or_ NTSC and not able to deal with both.....

    In France, multi-format TVs are pretty common (though not universal). This is probably due the fact that they're stuck with a TV standard (SECAM) that no-one else other than Russia uses. Multi-format TVs let them view TV from other nearby European nations (the UK, Germany, etc.). I know of several people in France that view UK satellite TV using a multi-format TV. I suspect multi-format TVs haven't caught on elsewhere because there's no real demand without which prices aren't driven down. In France, there is a demand, and multi-format TVs are barely more expensive than a regular TV.

  • In the late 80's - early 90's Apple sold black and white portrait displays which were the size of a portrait-oriented 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper.

    You didn't have to scroll. And because black and white monitors use a continuous coat of phosphor, rather than small but discrete rgb phosphors, it's easier on the eyes.

    Wish I had one - perfect for long stretches of typing and some composition. (21" b&w for better composition of course ;)
  • The sad fact is there will still be competing broadcast standards which make the NTSC/PAL/SECAM fight seem silly.

    Actually, the American DTV technical standards are pretty well settled in at this point. The only half-way outstanding question is which copy-protection scheme will be used for the box-to-box connection (cable to TV, etc), and at this point 5C seems to have it sewn up. Thomson and Zenith seem to have lost their battle to keep home video recorders a viable product.

    A six-month-old overview of the standards situation can be found online at Communications Engineering & Design magazine [cedmagazine.com].

    Many questions remain, however, in the non-technical areas. A huge battle lies ahead in determining who's going to make all the money from the "extra" bandwidth that the stations have. The stations would like to sell it themselves, but the networks have other plans.

    In that vein, CBS had been the big champion of using the extra bandwidth for HDTV, since they had only the one program stream. With the recent sale to Viacom, they might well change their tune to preferring non-HDTV multicasting of all of Viacom's programming.

    The other battle is between the broadcasters and the cable operators. The cable operators see DTV as added competition and don't see how DTV makes them any money, so they're not enthusiastic about it.

  • Last I heard about this, the idea was that by 2001, at least 50% of the broadcasts were to be in digital format, and then by 2006, all analog television signals were to be discontinued. The problem is is that the 4 networks have yet to agree on what aspect ratio and res to use, and some of the current digitial/widescreen TVs will not support all of them. Mind you, this was back in March when I last heard, but it's still an issue.

    Additionally, the sets still cost $3000+ to get. And the costs have not come down drastically from when they were first released. If, in 2005, these sets still cost in excess of $1000, I suspect you're going to see some major lawmaking either pushing the cost of sets way lower, or pushing back the transition date.

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