The Big Picture

[Gregg Lengling]

Forbes Magazine
High-definition television is one powerful technology. Unlike so many digital advances, it is not just incrementally better than the analog standard it replaces, but so superior that anyone who isn't blind can see it.

Digital broadcasting first arrived in the U.S. four years ago, federally mandated as the successor to a fuzzy analog system developed more than half a century ago. But thanks to wildly pricey equipment and nothing much to watch on it, high def initially met with astonishing indifference among broadcasters, cable providers and viewers. Now the general public is beginning to get the picture. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, more than 1.5 million digital televisions were sold in the first nine months of the year--83% more than the same period last year.

If you're interested in improving the images you watch--alas, there's not much you can do about the shows themselves--a high-definition system will do it. Prices are dropping: Small-picture HD-ready sets can be had for $700, big-picture units for $1,500 and outboard decoder boxes for $400. HD-ready sets are great for watching DVDs, and there's more high-def programming than ever from networks, cable systems and satellite providers.

There's so much high-definition equipment on the market today that I can't pretend to have looked at more than a fraction of it. But at the recent CEDIA Expo, the annual extravaganza of the home theater world, I spent hours looking at dozens of HDTV sets. Then I came home and put some preproduction units through their paces. When visitors dropped in while my living room was full of this stuff, they invariably had the same reaction: Wow!

Once you see The Sopranos or a baseball, football or basketball game in high def, filling a big, sharp screen, you'll wince at having to go back to fuzzy regular TV. High-definition pictures are roughly six times more detailed than traditional ones. Don't confuse high-definition TV with digital cable or digital satellite systems. They're digital, all right, but because they compress incoming signals and spit them out with missing data, the result is generally inferior to plain old TV.

My personal high-def dream machine is Marantz's new VP-12S2 projector. So what if it costs $12,500, not counting the screen? Watch a movie a night and in a couple of years it'll pay for all the tickets you would have bought at the sticky-floored cineplex. In a demo room and my living room, this digital projector produced stunning results from HDTV and DVD, and surprisingly good pictures from standard TV, thanks to an excellent lens and advanced signal processing.

But for those politically opposed to buying a TV as costly as a subcompact car, there are used-car-priced alternatives. Plasmas like Hitachi's 42-inch 42HDT20 are available for around $8,000. And a whole slew of big rear-projection models are available for $2,000.

But be careful out there. HDTV is dogged by the same growing pains as the analog era of Howdy Doody. Viewing network shows in eye-popping high def may mean bolting an antenna to your roof and aiming it at the nearest TV tower. And if you're interested in watching prerecorded material, curb your enthusiasm. Hollywood has trickled out a whopping 15 feature films, including such blockbusters as Galaxy Quest and Big Momma's House, plus a smattering of video productions.

If you're on the fence about buying a digital TV, here's what you need to know before you suffer through the sales pitches at your high-end electronics retailer. Think about what you watch--and how you watch it. Don't buy any TV equipment until you've seen it perform on three kinds of content: high definition, DVD movies and standard TV programming. HD sets' dirty secret is that they can make standard TV, the programs you're likely to watch most often, look awful. You can find HD-ready sets in both the squarish traditional 4:3 proportions and the more cineplex-like 16:9 screen. You probably don't want the 4:3 set; that would defeat HD's big-screen mission. But you sacrifice a bit with 16:9 because they force traditional programming into a pillarbox format, with black bars on both sides--and if you're not careful, the bar pattern can burn itself into the screen.

High-def sets fall into three basic categories: direct-view, rear-projection and front-projection.

Direct-view sets such as LCDs and good old tube models are typically bright but limited in screen size. High definition looks fine on small screens, but the combination doesn't make much sense. You can now find slim, pricey plasma screens with diagonal measurements bigger than five feet.

Rear-projection sets using multiple traditional tubes are by far the cheapest big-screen option, but the units can be heavy and ungainly; systems based on LCDs and Texas Instruments' mirror-flipping DLP chips are pricier but slimmer. Virtually all rear-projection models tend to lose brightness when viewed from even slightly above or below.

Front-projectors of any technology make it easy to fill a 100-inch screen, so they're the choice for true home theater and particularly well suited for movies, which have always been meant to be viewed by reflected light. But for best results, front-projection systems demand that the screen be chosen wisely and the screening room be dark. If you like to watch the ball game and read the sports section at the same time, front-projection is probably not for you. And projection sets, front or rear, will require replacing an expensive lamp every 2,000 hours or so.

Once you've settled on the basic style of TV set, it's time to think about the technologies that deliver the picture: cathode-ray tubes or fixed-pixel systems such as LCD, plasma and DLP.

Venerable cathode-ray tubes remain the dominant technology. Since CRTs work by painting lines on a blank screen, they have the advantage of being able to adapt to incoming signals by changing their output. If a high-def signal comes in with 1,080 interlaced lines, a tube system can adjust its picture to match. If you switch to a standard TV signal at 480 lines, it can adjust to reproducing that too. Manufacturers have long experience with tubes, but they are subject to burn-in.

Direct-view CRT sets are heavy for their size, and they can't deliver the really big pictures that can make high definition seem so immersive. CRT rear-projection units are the cheapest solution for big HDTV pictures and probably the best at adjusting to handle big standard-definition pictures as well. They are prone to alignment problems because they use three separate beams of light, one each for red, green and blue. They're big, bulky and heavy. Exemplary but expensive: Sony's $4,200 KD-34XBR2.

Tubes also remain the standard in front-projection. But CRT projectors can be expensive and finicky compared with newer-tech competition.

Fixed-pixel systems, instead of painting lines on the screen as CRTs do, light up an immovable grid of tiny dots, or pixels, across the screen. Each screen can display a single best "native" resolution, and pictures from all others must be mathematically "scaled" to fit. The de facto high-definition signal standard comes in at 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. A panel or projector that can display only 1,280 x 720 pixels--the minimum for true high def--will be forced to discard more than a million pixels. That sounds horrible, but the truth is, you may never notice. So far, no fixed-pixel system in the consumer market can display anywhere near the higher count, but lots of lesser systems look great.

One big problem with fixed-pixel systems is "upconverting," taking a standard-definition image and blowing it up to fill far more pixels than it actually delivers. Whereas a tube set will at worst simply adjust its scan lines to fill the screen, fixed-pixel systems are forced to compute which information to multiply and which to throw away. The process almost always gunks up the image with unpleasant visual hiccups. Although fixed-pixel displays often look better than tubes on high-quality material, they tend to look far worse on low-def channels.

The fixed-pixel pack includes:

LCD: Thin, flat LCD TV sets that look like computer monitors are getting cheaper, but they're still extremely costly compared with their tube-based brethren. The few HD models that exist are small and pricey. Example: Samsung's model LTM405W, at nearly $10,000 for a 40-inch display--roughly double the cost of a comparable plasma screen. Avoid LCD projection systems, which are falling behind DLP technology in picture quality. LCDs tend to generate a "screen door" effect that reveals the gridlike pixels creating the image.

JVC's promising D-ILA technology uses liquid crystals in an unusual way--by mounting them directly on chips that control the way they behave. The company's $10,000 DLA-SX21 front-projector displayed beautiful images at the CEDIA show.

Plasma: Plasma flat-panels are the slim and sexy supermodels of the home theater world. They've grown bigger--now up to 63 diagonal inches--but their thinness makes them relatively easy to fit into a room without dominating it. They're hardly cheap: 42-inch models start around $3,000, 50-inchers around $6,500. And though they can and often do deliver dazzling high-definition images, closer inspection often reveals those images to lack gradation in the brightest and darkest portions. Burn-in can be a problem and so can stuck pixels, bright dead zones as unsightly as a green pimple.

Careful comparisons at the CEDIA show convinced me that plasma screens with similar specifications produce wildly different image quality. Watch out for low-cost--well, relatively low-cost--screens with too few pixels or electronics inadequate to produce true high def. Plasma screens can be particularly ugly when displaying traditional TV.

DLP: Texas Instruments' mirror-flipping chips have been gaining popularity in lightweight front-projection units designed primarily for PowerPoint presentations. Now they've become centerpieces for home theater, with the best models using a new chip dubbed HD2, which has a native resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels, enough to make the highest resolutions look superb.

The $12,500 Marantz projector wins for sheer drool factor, but also excellent in the same exalted price range were two others that use the same HD2 chip: Sharp's $11,000 XV-Z10000U and InFocus' highly portable $10,000 ScreenPlay 7200. But even Sharp's portable DT-200 projector ($3,500), which uses a lower-end DLP chip with 800 x 600 pixel resolution, looked good--and its short-throw lens produced a huge image without having to mount it way across the room.

Samsung puts the HD2 chip into its 50-inch, $4,000 HLM507W, whose less-than-80-pound weight and 22-inch depth makes it downright svelte for a rear-projection unit. Images were excellent with HD source material and good with DVD, but traditional material was sometimes hard to watch. In bright scenes I occasionally noticed a fleeting rainbow effect, a distracting byproduct of the DLP system's fast-spinning color wheel that produces color bars in your field of vision when you shift your gaze.

A minority of HDTV sets include built-in tuners that can pluck local channels' high-def signals from the air. Others, including many high-end models, require an outboard decoder box of some sort, whether satellite, cable or broadcast, to get HDTV signals. High-def satellite decoders typically decode over-the-air signals as well; they also tend to cost hundreds of dollars more than their low-def counterparts.

The more inputs an HD set has, the better, including at least two component inputs, two S-video inputs and standard inputs for things like VCRs. If you're going to use the set for games--be very careful about burn-in--it's handier if at least one set of the inputs is on or near the front.

One crucial input is DVI-HDCP, which stands for Digital Visual Interface/High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection and is basically a way to protect Hollywood's content from being copied in digital form. You can bemoan the industry's desire to control the way you can use programs, you can bewail the idea of material that can't be copied and you can hope Hollywood won't be able to make it stick. But if studios do end up encrypting programs you want to watch and allowing them to travel only over this conduit--a scenario that many observers deem unlikely--you're out of luck without one, since there's simply no way to retrofit a unit that lacks it. Since many new HD-capable units include the DVI-HDCP connector, it makes sense to get one--but watch out for DVI jacks that lack HDCP.

One more connector is worth noting: FireWire, a.k.a. IEEE 1394. For the moment it's the only way to send programming digitally to a high-definition recorder such as JVC's $1,000 HM-DH30000 model, which uses a new tape format called DVHS. A FireWire connector in a set or a decoder box helps future-proof your investment. But for now FireWire is available only on Mitsubishi models and a smattering of others, as well as a few decoders.

HDTV generally sounds better than old-fashioned TV, thanks to six-channel audio that beats standard TV's mono or stereo. You're likely to need a receiver to drive six speakers--particularly if you have a plasma or front-projection display, which often omit the speakers entirely.

Get yourself to a showroom and see what my friends were wowing about in my living room. You may be so smitten with watching big, crisp, gorgeous wide-screen images from the comfort of your La-Z-Boy that you'll find yourself staring slack-jawed at anything at all you can find in high def--say, the third rerun in a week of Bikini Destinations: On Location with TheBikiniNetwork.com at Lake Powell on Internet billionaire Mark Cuban's satellite-delivered HDNET.

[P a u l]

Pay attention here. I took a quote from the above post and pasted it here:

"you sacrifice a bit with 16:9 because they force traditional programming into a pillarbox format, with black bars on both sides--and if you're not careful, the bar pattern can burn itself into the screen."

Since this is how WISN is transmitting I thought I should emphasize this portion of the post. One of our Engineers was told by the guru's at American TV & Appliance that with this letterbox format you should try and limit your viewing to somewhere around 15%. Now don't turn that dial just yet!!!!! Most STB's will allw you to Zoom in and adjust your picture to 16:9. Of course you are going to sacrifice some resolution. I'm pretty sure this only pertains to Plasma Monitors, but don't take my word for it. If all else fails read your owners manual or contact the manufactuer of your set.

[Tom Snyder]

Partially correct...

Unfortunately few (if any) TV's allow a resizing of a broadcast 4:3 formmated orignal source upconverted by the stations to be a 16:9 HD picture with the black bars...We can stretch your 4:3 analog signal, but you and ABC will just have to hurry up and make sure all your stuff, including local news, is true 16:9, to avoid wrecking our TV's or forcing us to swicth to a station that IS broadcasting a 16:9 HD picture.

[Todd Wiedemann]

Hey, Paul, perhaps this does belong in another thread, but what are the plans for HD local programming, especially news ?

[StarvingForHDTV]

I guess I'm kind of lucky because my set top box will crop away the sidebars for me.

But for those who cannot do that at home with their current equipment.  Why are the non-high definition (non-native 16:9) signals sent out by 1.1 (CBS) 4.1 (NBC) 34.1 (ABC) in 1080i or 720p?  All of the non-HD programming could be sent as 480i with a 4:3 aspect ratio like 1.2,1.3,10.1,10.2,10.3,10.4,10.5,22.1 does.  Then I think anyone's TV or set top box could do stretching, cropping, or zooming on the signals.

I can understand why the commercials during HD 16:9 material are sent out with the built in sidebars, but it makes no sense why local newscasts and other shows which are in the 4:3 480i format to start with are being sent out in a way that could potentially cause burn in issues to some viewers.

Obviously once all material is 16:9 native, this will no longer be an issue.  But until then...

Starving

[Pat]

If the TV is properly calibrated, burn-in will not be a problem.  As delivered, TVs are often in "torch" mode -- where the "contrast" setting is at its max.

Turn you contrast way down, to half or less and then adjust your brightness until just at the point where blacks are black -- not more and not less.  The result will be a significantly dimmer picture than you are used to.  But you *will* get used to it, and it will avoid burn in, will let the set last a lot longer, look more natural, etc.  (Get the Avia DVD to do it right -- there's a little more to it.)

Back to the question, however.  In the case of the Samsung STB I have (T150) hooked up the the 16:9 Mitsubishi which locks in widescreen on the HD input, there is an alternative.  If you lie to the STB and tell it the TV is 4:3, then the STB will allow you to crop off the sides, resulting in a stretched image on the TV.  (To me, it is so clumsy and time-consuming to do, that it's not a real option, however.)

Otherwise, with this combination, there are no good "zooming" options when the station broadcasts a 16:9 signal with a 4:3 image.

If the stations would broadcast 4:3 images in 4:3 signals, the Samsung would offer a zoom, which would crop the top and bottom.  (Personally, I wouldn't care much for this option.  Don't like cropping, period.)  Or it will display the 4:3 image centered within a black or gray background.

Other options the station might have include sending moving, unobtrusive backgrounds at the sides (I believe NBC (or HD-Net) did this during the Olympics), or merely a medium gray background instead of black.

Personally though, I prefer it the way it is.  The negative burn-in has not been a problem in 2 years and I don't anticipate that it will be in the future.

[This message has been edited by Pat (edited 10-30-2002).]

[ReesR]

A method which works for me if I don't want the side bars is to switch the resolution on my Samsung TS-160 to 480i (yes, even if the source signal is 1080i) and then use my own receivers stretch mode to get rid of the bars.  Works neat except for having to manually switch the resolution from the back of the STB.

Normally what I do, however, is just switch to a Chicago station.  They all stretch standard def sources for you to 16x9.  The only time I see black bars from them is when they are rebroadcasting network 1080i or 720p and the network goes to 4:3 commercials.



------------------
Rees Roberts
Racine, WI
reesr@wi.net

HDTV Receiver:  Sony KD-34XBR2 16X9
Bi-directional AntennaCraft VHF Yagi Model #2260P
+
2 Winegard PR9022 UHF yagi's pointing N & S
Antennas at about 30 feet
Samsung SIR-TS160 HD Directv receiver