DTV "drafthouse" at NAB

[oflaherty]

The National Association of Broadcasters convention is underway this week in Las Vegas. The NAB and Consumer Electronics Association have put together a display to show off new and existing products.

At the "DTV Drafthouse" there were two new set top decoders.. Zenith was showing its HDV420 with a suggested price of $399.. and a new company called ADB was talking about it's T71 decoder.. but didn't have a real product to show.

The video card company ATI is showing off it's smart antenna technology using their ATI Set Top Wonder card and special software and a special interface cable to  anRDI Smart Antenna. They communicate with each other to select the best signal for each station. It is not an end product..but ATI says the chips and software will be available in off the shelf products by the 4th quarter of 2003.

There were several large plasma sets in the drafthouse display.. I liked the Sony 42" KE-42TS2 best..it seemed to be the brightest .. but it's native resolution is only 1024 X 1024.

Zenith also had a demo of it's Enhanced VSB transmission system. It cuts the regular 19.4 Mbps DTV payload by various amounts to add a second more robust signal for mobile data, audio or perhaps an SD service.. Older receivers would not decode the new enhanced signal, but would still get the regular DTV part of the channel. In the demo they were doing HD on the regular signal at 12.4 Mbps and a robust SD service at 3 Mbps.

---Sean (usually at TMJ) but at NAB this week