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Cable HDTV Not Ready For Primetime?
A reader writes: "Shelly Palmer head of the New York Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Advanced Media committee and the man that gave us the singing cats in the meow mix ads has posted a very entertaining article on his blog about finally getting a Scientific Atlanta SA8000HD High Definition, DVR-enabled cable boxes from Time Warner Cable in Manhattan, his adventures getting it to work, and its less than stellar performance."
Can someone please explain HDTV to me? While I was in the states this summer, I saw HDTV on a ~60 inch television. It was amazing. What exactly is this technology, and more importantly, what's the status in Europe? :-)
I live in Denmark myself.
The pain of early adoption at its purest.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Television is dead and HDTV is even more dead ... how many years have they spun standard after standard?!
Computers and the net will take over as the receivers of the future.
HomeTheaterPC anyone?!
HDTV reminds me of the metric system, always a promise for a better future, but never grabbed hold of enough marketshare to make a diff.
All of Europe and Asia is a pretty decent market share.
The best tech doesn't always win (eg- VHS vs Beta,
Beta only offered 1 hour tapes when it was first released. VHS offered 2 hour tapes. Picture quality isn't everything.
mine works just fine.. had it for about 6 months, and no problems at all.
it would be nice to have a little more storage space, and it seems to randomly reset about once a month (it just turns off, strangest thing).
i should note that i've never used a tivo or anything like it before though, so for all i know it could be a total steaming pile of shit.
Just accept the fact that 4:3 TVs and go on. See in HD the width is 16:9 and if you want to watch 90% of the Broadcasts in today market than that 16:9 is going to have to be stretched or chopped from the 4:3. Now lets say that you accepted that 90% of the broadcasts are 4:3 and that neither chopping nor stretching is acceptable then what do you do - get a 4:3 TV.
Ahh, I here but what about HD 16:9 signals - well we have watched DVD that can range are even wider than 16:9 on 4:3 TVs for years and I can accept the black bars at the top and bottom.
Do I hear more rumbling about screen size and weight as the wight of a 4:3 is quite high - Well I have two Tivo machines and a replay (for comparisons) driving a projector as I don't have digital TV at my local yet. In the past with digital, I could hook up directly from my digital turner to my audio tuner to handle the audio video distribution.
Let me tell you that anyone that sees the Projector is astounded and its only an cheap HP with 1500 Lumens @ 800x600. Yeah it needs to have the curtains closed but at night it like a movie screen. The cost was only like ~700 bucks and the weight savings is a factor of like 500 pounds. The projector can't show true HD quality but it is more than enough for DVD 480p; thus, save your money if you go this route and wait until more Lumens (brightness) and resolution (something that can show 1080p) comes along at a cheaper price.
I have one of the TimeWarner HD-DVRs he writes about. The box is really flaky. Go over to AVS Forum and you will see a lot of complaints on it. Im almost sorry I gave up my rock solid Tivo for it, but am hopeful that through firmware updates that the constant stuttering of sound and video and lockups will stop.
Previous to getting this particular box I had a standard HD set top box, which never had a hiccup. And for what it is worth, watching a sporting event on a big screen in HD is spectacular.
I guess the point is that his conclusion that HD is not ready for primetime is really not a valid one, rather, I can attest that this particular HD-DVR is clearly not ready for prime time.
--Spooky Action At A Distance
Ok... read the article. Time Warner cable sux... he has nothing to say bad about the hardware other than the crippling done by TW. He also is displeased with the channels that TW provides.
Hate to say it... but this is one place where over-the-air has kicked butt. You may not be able to get as many channels but even in podunkville where I live I can get 11 HDTV sources and they all look beautiful. My pcHDTV card renders them flawlessly on my monitor (which is set up for HDTV resolution).
Over-the-air is getting fairly standard and stable now. HD dish channels are actually starting to work out nicely now as well... but cable is gonna die if they keep moving at the current snail crawl they have going for their HD/SD rollouts.
And for those wondering about HDTV and their future.... don't go to someones house with HDTV unless you want to buy it yourself. I about killed 2 peoples credit ratings by letting them watch the Olympic ceremonies at my place.
(Current Setup 3.2Ghz/512Mb/320Gb AMD box running MythTV with a pcHDTV card displaying on a 21" CRT)
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
The spec for a full HDTV signal with DD 5.1 audio is an uncompressed 18 megabit/sec stream vs like 1 for a regular channel. No way is the cable company going to allow an HD channel to consume 18X the bandwidth than a regular channel, so they trhottle the heck of of them. Leads to poor picture, artifacts, slow tuning, all the things the article referes to. Right now (SW Houston) the OTA HD signal from my local affiliates is FAR superior to anyhting the TWC puts out. Problem is most folks either a) are not sophisticated enough consumers to know the difference or b) are so happy to get any HD content after buying a 5K TV set they accept sub-par signals as the best they can get. Gonna be a while before this resolves itself, till then go buy a yagi antenna from Radio Shack and enjoy real HDTV (assuming you have an OTA set top box.....)
"Would you, could you, with a goat?" Dr Seuss
I bought a 27 inch Sony HDTV a few months ago. It wasn't that much more expensive than a Sony SD TV. While the other brands of TVs have really caught up (and in some cases surpased) Sony in regulat TV quality, the comparison between Sony and non-Sony HDTVs (tube-based) at least was quite dramatic. Sony was just much crisper, much clearer. I got a 4:3 TV since most of the content I'll be watching is regular (Adult Swim, HGTV), and either stretching or showing the gray bars on the sides of a 6:9 was more annoying than black bars above and below. On Time Warner, there are only 5 or 6 HD channels, 2 more if you subscribe to HBO HD and Showtime HD. So there isn't that much choice. I'd say I only watch one or two shows in HDTV a week. The networks that do have HD, most of the programs with the exception of some prime time shows, are in regular definition. If you're a DVD movie buff, DVDs will play better on an HDTV, even though DVDs are standard defintion. If you've got a progressive-scan DVD player and a 480p input for your HDTV, film-based DVDs (not video/TV-based) will play about 30% sharper on an HDTV (interlaced TV reduces apparent resolution by about 30% because of the optical effect of interlacing). If I had to do it over again, I'd probably just go with a regular defintion TV.
If you've got any background in A/V design, you'll probably notice the following in his post:
Various appeals to brand name and amount of money spent. This reveals that he doesn't know what he's talking about. BOSE (outside their marketing department) is not respected among Pro A/V circles. This guy clearly expects he can spend his way to a great A/V setup, a decidely anti-geek and anti-A/V professional stance.
Complaints about the 'blurriness' of SD material A good TV will reveal flaws in source material. Large screen TVs, HDTVs, and poor scaling are the likely culprits here-as any A/V professional would know.
This blog post is still useful-you wouldn't believe how many people who have more money than sense buy and HDTV and hook up all the sources through the RF input (channel 3). Mr. Palmer's disappointment with HDTV mirrors the uninformed early adopter experience happening across the USA!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Ideally, you'd be correct, but practically, the manufacturers are still getting a handle on this stuff. I have a Philips 60" HD-capable (no tuner) projection TV. It has 2 inputs that appear to be HD capable, both have component inputs, one also supports DVI.
The component-only input only actually supports 480i, with the component cables simply giving you a cleaner video input. Feed it 480p, 720p, or 1080i, and all you'll see is garbage. The other input supports 1080i and 480p, but not 480i and 720p. When I first received my HD Dish Network receiver, it was defaulted to 720p, which once again caused my TV to display garbage. I had to set up a temporary composite video feed to my TV so I could dig through the menus and tell the receiver to output 1080i instead.
As a technophile, this wasn't a huge problem. But to the average consumer, this would be out and out maddening. And just try to explain to them why the TV won't let them properly connect their HDTV receiver and their progressive scan DVD player at the same time. All of this rubbish is temporary - the manufacturers will eventually work it out. But for now, consumers *do* need at least an understanding of the different resolution options, and possibly some outside help to get their HD rig running.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?