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18% of Consumers Can't Tell HD From SD
An anonymous reader writes "Thinking about upgrading to an HDTV this holiday season? The prices might be great, but some people won't be appreciating the technology as much as everyone else. A report by Leichtman Research Group is claiming that 18% of consumers who are watching standard definition channels on a HDTV think that the feed is in hi-def." (Here's the original story at PC World.)
I'm half blind, and SD makes me want to gouge my eyes out after watching HD.
Perhaps even more irritating than this, is how some people can't distinguish between 30 and 60 FPS (or at least don't care), when of course there is a massive difference. The latter is much smoother for all kinds of programmes and games. 120 FPS of course would be even better...
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
I don't think the summary is accurate. It's the people who don't know, not that they can't tell.
The links don't say that 18% can't tell the Difference
Just that 18% can't tell if what their seeing is HD
An analogy would be playing mp3's, and asking people if it was 320kbps, or 64kbps.
Most people won't be able to tell the encoding rate just by hearing it, but if you play two different versions side by side they should be able to pick out the difference.
They probably can tell the difference, but they can't spot HD just by looking at it.
Give them an HD Content for a month and they'll quickly learn however.
To avoid criticism; Say nothing, Do nothing, Be nothing.
I'd be more interested in a comparison between upscaled SD and HD. That is, an upscaled DVD (even the Xbox 360 upscale would do...no need to go fancy), vs a 720p source. I bet that 18% would become much, much higher... I have 2 TV of exactly the same size and resolution, and I tried putting them side by side... aside for the annoying 4:3 ratio that most DVDs are in, Its freakishly hard to tell the difference on anything below 40-45 inches (at a reasonable distance... of course its easy if you have your face in the TV).
The biggest reason SD "looks so awful about seeing HD" is because the built in upscalers of most HDTV is completly horrible, and make SD sources look faaaaaar worse than they should.
We should set up a charity, so that those 18% of people can switch their HDTV's with people like me who have crappy old SD TV's, but would be able to tell the difference!
There's an ongoing battle in my family between keying in the "standard definition" version of channels and the "high definition". They all think I'm this weird limey geek (I'm the only English person in the family) who's obsessed with it. They're right of course. You should've seen the argument when I blocked the SD channels *grin*.
The fact is, most people really don't care so long as the TV is reasonably sharp and the sound is reasonably good. Standard definition is perfectly watchable to the average user, HDTV is still seen as just another buzz word. The majority of people with newer HDTVs are watching them with the coaxial cable stuffed into the antenna port in SD, and they're none the wiser.
I'm sorry, but that 18% is a complete bunch of morons.
Maybe the OTA signal coming in may supposedly show up as HD when it's SD, but it's real easy to tell the difference if you're using cable or FiOS.
And I'm able to see this on a 46" Samsung 6 Series LCD with HDMI.
It all goes back to the source. If the OTA broadcast is crap, that's what you'll receive, and that's what the cable company will put out.
Come on, 18%?
If you told me 10% of people can't tell that their TV is turned on or not I wouldn't be surprised.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
20 year old eyes are much better than 50 year old eyes. I wonder how many of the 18% are older folks? I'm 55 and I'm hard-pressed to distinguish between SD and HD.
All you have to do is listen to the difference between an extrodinary classical recording of say Stravinsky on Columbia from 1960 Le Sacre De Printemps in a digital remaster to high def audio specs...then listen to the same thing on an mp3 download. It is amazing what passes for good audio these days. I am convinced that the average listener is half deaf! So is it any wonder that our eyes are suffering the same degradation from the video pollution that assaults us daily.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
Or is that Secure Digital
Of course the psychology of words will make you believe this is horrible, when in fact, 82% can tell the difference!
Then, like said elsewhere, a properly upscaled good-resolution SD is very potent. What is crap is the digital signals we're being fed.
A story that happened to me. I used to listen to Paramount channel for ST:V a few years ago (god I'm old), and this was the only digital channel I used to have. Sometimes, I couldn't listen to some shows immediately, so I time-shifted them on a VHS, in EP (that's the 8 hours per cassette mode, young folks ;) ), and even then, with quality degraded, I could still see the digital scans when scenes were changed, or during space-blacks! Now that my boobtube provider is putting approximately 3 times the amount of channels into the same QAM, quality is even worse than before.
but consumer TV video only gets marginally better after 50 years? I say give those old fart engineers that designed SD video some cred.
I work in A/V, recently installed about 30 52" flat panel displays (native 720 pixel res), and have been testing SD, various res of PC video, and 1080p on these things. Everyone that looks can tell a difference, but nobody says "Wow!" It just isn't that much of a change.
They were right - the revolution did not get televised. It was posted on YouTube instead. All in 120 characters. SLOOSH!
That's depressing. I mean, how hard is it really? One's as big as a postage stamp and goes in your camera, and the other goes in your computer ... oh, wait ...
Please use usersAreBlind instead ;-)
In all seriousness though, blaming people for being unable to tell the difference between SD and HD isn't a positive thing. The irony being that if they can't tell the difference they get to save themselves a whole lot of money. Thoguh personally I'd rather have decent eyesight and make the choice of SD vs HD based on whether I think it's worth it. I can tell the difference and I'll be sticking with SD until HD is much cheaper by the way.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Humans are often easily distracted creatures, as demonstrated by numerous examples of highly successful ad campaigns over the years. As long as you present the audience with enough interesting or flashy content, the quality of the medium becomes less relevant.
The solution to speeding up HD adoption, is to make the content itself less interesting. The viewers will have no choice but to start taking notice of external annoyances like picture quality.
8==8 Bones 8==8
The big jump in quality comes when the channel is end-to-end digital. That's a huge improvement over NTSC. But 1080p from a DVD player with upscaling and HDMI output is hard to distinguish from "broadcast-quality" HDTV. Pixar's pixel-clean digital animation on Blu-Ray looks great, because all the detail really is there, the compression isn't too harsh, and Pixar makes their Blu-Ray disks from the digital data, not a photographic film intermediate. If there's photographic film in the middle, the image is degraded, and a sizable chunk of the bandwidth goes into trying to represent film grain.
There's still too much compression,. Look at football in HDTV. While the camera pans, there's blurring, and shortly after, but not immediately after, the camera stops moving, the blades of grass suddenly get sharp edges as the data stream catches up. ESPN insists on a minimum bandwidth allocation from cable companies to try to keep the compression artifacts down to a tolerable level, but it's still marginal.
It's almost better to have lower resolution rather than annoying compression artifacts.
Including:
- type of screen - plasma vs LCD, SD would be more noticeable on the latter IMHO.
- 720p, 1080i or 1080p? All are technically "HD".
- distance from screen - it is well established that HD only improves your experience if you are close enough to overcome your eyes' limited ability to resolve that level of detail.
- quality of signal - I have seen "HD" signals which were so compressed and crappy they looked worse than well-encoded SD signals. Similarly, many "HD" broadcasts are just re-encoded from non-HD content.
My gf routinely has the SD, rather than HD, version of various TV channels on because evidently from her point of view there is no discernable difference. This is a 42" plasma from about 4 metres away.
In any event, this just highlights that, as with all audio-visual products, how it actually looks/sounds to you is far more important than its specs. IMHO you are much better off with a good 720p plasma (Pana or Pioneer) than a mediocre 1080p LCD, for example - you will get better colour, much less ghosting, and (if set up correctly) a more faithful reproduction of the source material rather than a sharpened, cartoon-y looking version like many LCDs produce.
In addition, your expected use is critical - movies and sport tend to suggest a plasma will suit your needs, whereas lots of normal broadcast TV/desktop-type computer use might be better suited to an LCD.
Read Pynchon.
Is HD better than SD, yes. Is it worth the $1000 extra you have to spend on everything to get HD? IMHO, no, but I know others feel differently.
Telling the difference between HD and SD is easy.
What's hard is telling the difference between different types of SD.
See if you can spot the difference between 576p and 480p on an analog display. ;)
I'm impressed that the 18% number isn't higher. I mean, come on. The bottom 18% of your high school class were "F" students. And that was when someone was regularly feeding them info, telling them how to tell what was going on, regularly testing them. These people are morons. 82% noticing it's HD is pretty impressive.
--
make install -not war
That's about all they have proven.
Consummer Reports found that the diff between 720 and 1080 was not that noticable.
It could be seen but not that big a deal.
The biggest reason SD "looks so awful about seeing HD" is because the built in upscalers of most HDTV is completly horrible, and make SD sources look faaaaaar worse than they should.
I don't agree with this. I think the biggest reason is because HD is usually in 16x9, so it is not stretched on a new widescreen TV. If there are bars (usually for commercials) they are usually encoded in the signal. SD, in contrast, is always 4:3 so you either have black bars (which is the correct way), stretching (most people do this) or cropping.
I think stretching is the worst possible solution, but it also seems to be the most common, especially in TV store displays and other public places. I have changed some TVs to black bars, and the immediate response is "change it back! We hate black bars". The fact that the screen is horribly stretched usually goes unnoticed.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Nearly four out of five viewers can tell the difference. This correlates well with other studies that show four out of five respondents answer surveys.
Sig this!
But if you get a device that is capable of displaying better -- and the device is bigger than what you've had before -- Yes, you definitely need HD. And you will also realize how worthless buying DVDs are, when what airs on HDTV has twice the pixels (720p = 2.25X DVD, 1080p = 6X dvd). The longer you wait, the more you're hurting yourself in the long run. And granted I still watch a lot of SDTV, but that's animation. Curb Your Enthusiasm was the ONLY live action show in the past year i've seen in SDTV only, and on a big 52-inch TV with greater pixel depth, it looked as bad as a VHS does on a normal tv.
An extra $1000? Yes. But you act like the $1000 only buys the SDTV->HDTV different. It doesn't. The extra $1000 buys a huge TV.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
The difference between dreck and HDTV-dreck is a difference that makes little difference.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I am really surprised at how many people here did not take Economics 101 or slept through the class.
All corporations have a legal responsibility to "INCREASE SHAREHOLDER VALUE" -- that is it, bottom line, you and I don't count.
And as far as that "consumer" attitude, I don't need that either, danged near starved to death at BestBuy with my mouth stuck on that TV trying to eat enough HD's. Tried bar-b-queing, baking, boiling, frying CD's and they are still tough and chewy.
Now, once again I will let you know that the USoA died in the 80's. It was replaced by the UCCA. The United Corporations and Churches of America.
Where the real product is the stock and the true customer is the stockholder and if you don't go to someone's particular Sunday service you are toast - literally in their eyes.
And lastly I'm an administrator of 9-1-1 and the killing off of law enforcement radio freqs. just to have Digital HD Broadcast is a farce, because in a major fire the fire generates EMF that is a harmonic of the freq's and the firefighter walking into the building on the end of the hose will get/send only static. THANKS FCC for being another Hollywood Clueless Stooge.
Error: Your insult has encountered a short circuit at the other end, and has bounced back at you with infinite VSWR.
80% of consumers can't tell 192kbps mp3 from FLAC. 70% of comsumers can't tell IE from Firefox. 60% of consumers can't tell their head from their ass. Your point?
Of course I've pulled these numbers out of my ass, where I pull 63% of all statistics I post on Slashdot.
And I'm sure I'm not that much of a minority.
Does any framerate greater than your monitor's refresh rate matter?
Yes. If your engine can render at 120 fps, it can render the scene twice and combine the two images to add motion blur. This makes fast motions, such as projectile motions and the constant quick pans of any first-person game, look more realistic. It's also why film looks acceptable despite 24 fps.
Is HD really that much better than SD? Is a dual core really that much better than a single core? Is 100Mbits/sec really better than 20Mbits/s?Is a $5000 hifi really better than a $200 one?
Once people have something that is "good enough", they don't value an improvement. This is vexing for companies trying to psh consumers to the next level.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Generally SD looks noticeably better when upscaled on a respectable HDTV. Especially when the person has upgraded from a CRT, old rear projection or some older not so good panel TV. Also, a current HDTV will have superior colour &/ contrast (often artificially boosted) than the older SD screen.
These factors would account for a good fraction of the statistic the being rest of the would be accounted for by the Idiot Factor - or to be fair, that many people have slightly off eyesight, or may be just sitting too far away.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
... It's the same old crappy writing and acting, characters and dialogue. Now, with HD, you get a crystal clear image of the crap they put on the millions of channels. Yay! Maybe once they put out something worth watching I'll worry about the picture quality.
This is the best restaurant I ever eat in
And in other news: 82% of people CAN tell the difference between SD and HD.
www.cowclops.net/resolutionchart1.png
You want your optimal viewing distance to be on the line for whichever format you watch the most of, which is about where you'd notice the quality difference between that and the next worst format. If you have a TV smaller than 42" or so or you're sitting very far away for whatever screen size you have, you won't be able to tell the difference.
And yes, I'm going too post this on every "Stupid people can't tell SD from HD" story until people stop asserting that HD isn't that much of an improvement over SD. I use a 720p projector on a 65" screen that I sit 10 feet away from and Transformers on HD-DVD looks CONSIDERABLY better than Transformers on DVD.
18% of audiophiles were surprised that they could tell no difference between sound coming through standard 18 gauge wiring and sound coming through $200 per foot premium cables. The other 82% of audiophiles distinctly heard the difference. However, it turns out that the engineers performing the test forgot to actually switch over from the cheap ones to the expensive ones so both tests were on the same cheap wires.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Recently there were experiments done that proved that the effect that people report of "time slowing down" or them seeing things faster, etc. is a complete mental illusion that is only inherent in the remembering of the event and is not present during the actual event.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
So I tell the salesman, this HD display looks like c...p. And he tells, "its not HD, its SD."
Here is a link that discusses this further. They mention that a human can see an object that is displayed for one 500th of a second, if it is bright enough. In RL your eyes do the motion blur for you. This is also similar to how anti-aliasing works, which in its basic form is rending the frames at a higher resolution than the monitor can display and then downsizing the picture so we can averaging the pixels.
HDTV IS RICE! DVD is here for the long haul, don't waste bandwidth on advertising.
People are catching on to the "sample-and-hold" effect that even the fastest response-time LCDs produce loads of motion blur on account that they hold the image rather than scan-strobe it as a traditional video monitor. Google "LCD motion blur sample and hold" to see what people say on this.
In other news...18% of people are legally blind!
Truth be told, I'd bet it would be many more if they were dealing with typical home screen sizes and distances (i.e. not what an A/V-phile goes for). HD makes a marginal difference for most people, to be sure, but simply not enough to be worth the ridiculous prices they charge for the stuff.
About 70% of consumers think that hooking up an HDTV to an SDTV cable box makes it HDTV. And 99% of consumers don't realize that the big box stores have a nasty habit of piping SDTV into the cheaper HDTVs while the expensive boxes get the real deal.
They can't tell, but I see a world of difference, and that's all that matters.
4 years ago, yet again, 50% of the voting public was unable to distinguish a person that can lead the strongest nation in the world from an ape.
Sports at eleven.
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People can't tell the difference from HD and SD because when using cable (Charter, USCable, Comcast, etc.) there is not a difference they compress the crap out of the signal to fit more on the available room on a cable line. I know this because I use to work for a contractor that was working for a major cable company here in MN. I am not talking from experience but I hear that satellite HD is much better then cable can. That is just hear say from my side. However DVD is much better then either and watching Blue-Ray is way better then DVD. Happy Thanksgiving!
- Did not graduate from high school
- are functionally illiterate
- Have IQs less than 85
In my experience, people tend to care more about things other than the video resolution when watching TV. Like, say, the plot, or the character development.
Watching hokey, on the other hand, I can understand why people would want to see the puck better, but in the general case I think no one gives a *** about resolution.
If it's a good movie I'll happily watch it at 320, blurry, at 15 FPS, if that's all I can get.
Frankly, when it comes down to it, the sound quality matters more than the video.
If you can't hear what the actors are saying you may as well turn it off, but if you can basically get the idea of what's going on, video isn't that critical.
Maybe I just have low standards.
18% of Consumers Can't Tell HD From SD
And..
[..] claiming that 18% of consumers who are watching standard definition channels on a HDTV think that the feed is in hi-def.
There's a big difference between comparing HD vs. SD and watching an SD broadcast only and decide whether it is HD or not. The title is rather misleading.
Full Tilt
Direct has good upscaleing on the hd boxes also no hd channel hunting. Also the guild and menus look good unlike on a cable box that look like crap on a HD tv.
There is something that they aren't accounting for. People (especially less tech savvy people) not realizing that they aren't watching HD, they just assume if it's on a newer plasma/lcd, then it's HD.
For example, I have a relative who was watching football today on my cousin's plasma. He of course tuned to the channel he gets at home (CBS), the non-HD version. Simply because he had no idea that verizon offers HD versions of pretty much all basic cable just by going to channels above 500 in my area.
At some point, it occurred to me that the picture didn't quite look up to snuff, so I asked him what channel he was on (since often SD os broadcast on HD channels because the original signal was SD), he said 7. I said "a-ha! you should switch to the HD version of this channel!".
He was confused, but told me to go for it. He was *amazed* at the difference in clarity. He said claimed it looked like he was down on the field.
Not being able to tell the difference is very difference from not knowing there is a difference available.
I would wager that if you put the 2 screen side by side, one showing the signal in true HD and the other in SD. Anyone without vision problems can tell the difference.
Who gives a shit? 18% of the people probably still think the world is flat. I bet a lot of those people said that because they're resisting buying a new TV.. or, like my Mom, who bought a new SD TV 4 years ago, and really doesn't want to buy a new one yet.
Where's this story: 82% of the people think that HD television is better than SD television. If that's not news worth, why is this?
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
18%.. Wow. Isn't the easiest way to tell is by right clicking your VLC window and clicking video info?
18% could tell the difference between VHS Video Tape and DVD quality either.
85% of the people that download movie videos off of the BitTorrent networks can't tell the quality isn't HDTV quality either, and just someone with a video camera in a movie theater in China or Russia, and made a smaller resolution to download it faster.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
You wrote:
You've told us this is a 42" (1.07m) screen. I'll assume this is the diagonal measure and the screen is 16:9, rather than 16:10. For a 1.07m diagonal 16:9 screen, the width is 0.93m and the height is 0.52m (* = at 16:10, this would be 0.91m by 0.57m).
Now refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_acuity and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_resolution, which tell us:
Someone with 20/20 vision standing 4m from a screen can only discern pixels that are at least 1.16 mm apart. So to distinguish a black and white stripe pattern from solid gray at that distance, you would need a screen at least 0.56m tall in 480p, or at least tall 1.26m in 1080p.
Since the screen height is only 0.52m, we conclude that someone with 20/20 vision should see 480p and 1080p stripe patterns as solid gray from 4m away.
*** Disclaimers: (1) I know your 4m number is just an approximate guess; it could off by enough that someone with 20/20 vision could actually see the stripe pattern. (2) Manufacturers fudge their numbers on screen size and physical resolution; plasma cells are a strange beast. (3) If the screen is 16:10 then the height is 0.57m, which would mean someone with 20/20 vision could see a stripe pattern at 4m if its native resolution were 480p; however, the set's resampling mode may cause it to display gray lines in 1080p, or it might display some double-height lines and some single height lines. Ultimately the conversion process biases the experiment too much to have any merit in the real world.
They did a phone survey?
This might be a bit more useful if they actually showed people.
How many people could tell the difference between YouTube and SDTV?
Wake me up when we have HD 3D pr0n available.
Proving that at least 18% of consumers are morons. If you can't tell SD from 1080 you're blind.
It's strange, but I work with stereoscopic video and have noticed that even 640X480 in stereo 3D looks a lot sharper than 1920X1080 mono.
It is a psycho-visual effect, for sure. But it is real.
IMHO - forget about HD and use the bandwidth for 3D.
18% of consumers can't tell the difference.
72% can.
Misleading facts and poor mathematics.
I fail to see how enjoying a clearer reception on your TV is Geekdom, nor how it effects my ability to "Go for a walk, a swim, a cycle or just get laid."
HDTV works as a clearer signal in rural areas, and takes up less space in the "aerial network".
Isn't that something we should all agree on; geek or not.
Honestly, I would understand if people were looking on CRTs, that could display all video at native resolution, but I really cannot abide anything displayed at non-native resolution. Like, I seriously cannot understand how you could stand to watch video at even 720p on a 1080i display. I can't stand it when people at work have 1280x1024 LCDs at 800x600. I can't stand video wrong either.
~50% voted for Bush Jr. twice.
Isn't that people are stupid, but that the HD content we currently have isn't exactly HD. Even the snazziest Blu-Ray displays in places like the Sony Store or any big electronics retailer seem to have really nice-looking visuals, but they also seem to have a big problem not only with interlacing(?! Isn't this 1080p?!), but also with video compression artifacts. In many cases, when I look at the TV's on display, I can't usually tell that what I'm looking at is HD, unless the video's been specifically tailored to show off the resolution. TV broadcasts (the few that are HD around here), Blu-Ray movies (especially live action), doesn't matter. It all looks quite muddy, and I'm distracted often by the block and ring artifacting, just as I was when DVD was first released.
I don't have an HDTV or an HD player, myself, so I'm not intimately familiar with how current movies are being compressed on the disc, but... Don't they have any room to turn up the bitrate a little? I mean, sure, it's not reasonable to expect an uncompressed image (though I'd really like it), but seriously, the video compression quality sucks.
You can have as high a resolution as you want, but when artifacts are large enough to casually notice, you've defeated the purpose of that resolution; I would have rathered a cleaner lower-definition source than that.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
We've got a 42" 1080p lcd tv and a Dish HD to feed it. The video is (presumably) 1080p over analog component. I can see the difference, but I truly don't give a shit for the most part.
When we still had the SD DVR and I had to stretch Stargate Atlantis (meaning the effective resolution was sub-SD) to fill the screen, I got tweaked more than a little. But other than that (which doesn't happen anymore with the non-4:3-aware HD DVR), I can honestly say that I don't much care. Yeah, I can pause Law & Order and count the strands of Elizabeth Rohm's hair or stop Atlantis and count the stubble in John Sheperd's beard - but so what?
I'm here to watch the criminals get caught or the Wraith be foiled again, not to stroke my e-penis to the thought of how awesome my screen's picture is. Unless the picture is suffering horrible abberations or the audio is like 64kbps mp3, those don't really impede the story.
In conclusion: It's absolutely astonishing how many details your brain can paint in or interpolate if you let it.
'Nuff said.
Seems low!
I understand their problems, as A lot of the HD porn I download is really SD or just an simple upscaling. Really makes me sad. And I always believed DVDs would allow for multi camera views. Why mess with me and my porn addiction!
I have always had slightly better than 20/20 vision, and I just tested myself on a 20" 1680x1050 LCD monitor. My results: the black and white stripe pattern turns gray somewhere between 40" (lines clearly visible) and 50" away (obviously gray). The 1 arc-minute figure quoted for 20/20 vision predicts 35 inches on this monitor.
Based on this confirmation, we can make a general rule of thumb: 1080 = sit 2x to 3x, 720p = sit 3x to 4.5x. In other words, stick with 720p unless you plan to sit within 3x the screen size, and don't even bother getting an HD source if you're going to sit more than 4.5x the screen size.
Example: For a 42" screen size, 1080p can be noticeably better than 720p if you plan to sit 7 to 10 feet away from the screen because it's close enough to resolve the 720p but far enough away that you cannot resolve the 1080p. Likewise, 720p can be noticeably better than 480p if you sit 10 to 15 feet from the screen. This matches the GP's recommendation of using 720p at a viewing distance of approximately 13 feet from a 42" screen (ratio of 3.7 is between 3x and 4.5x).
Put a well calibrated, great TV with an SD feed next a budget TV with out-of-the-box calibration playing an HD feed and I'm guessing it would be WAY over 18%.
Given most cable companies will bump $10/month on for HD, another $10/month for an HD DVR... That several hundred you saved by getting the budget model is invalidated within a year or two of lousy quality HD experiences.
That's before you drop $200 for a Blu-ray player and $20-30/movie for the discs vs. weekly $4.99 DVD sales at Best Buy.
HD is a great thing... when displayed on a well calibrated, great set. But the guys I saw lining up already outside BestBuy, along with a hell of a lot of other consumers, aren't buying great sets. They're buying the cheapest thing with an HD label slapped on it that they can find. They're then blowing many times the price difference, over the life of the TV, on feeding it with something that ends up looking worse than SD on the great set their money would've been better spent on. Plus that great set can always display HD when you've got the money to spare again.
How can anyone take a study seriously that supposedly examines visual perception by talking to people over the phone? They learned nothing except that some people answer questions over the phone a certain way. That study design leads to the error of forced responses, producing responses where none would have been forthcoming except for the question having been asked. Such answers have nothing to do with any perceptual ability, bias or preference.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
That's because there is not much difference in even a high-quality standard def CRT with a DVD signal running to it and a HDTV with DVD or even Blu-Ray running to it when one is sitting at a proper viewing distance.
People have been seriously deluded by this whole "HD" phenomenon/hoax lately, and I'm frankly sick of it. Unless you are sitting closely and CAREFULLY watching for details, there is not a lot of difference in a quality SD CRT and even a quality LCD/Plasma. I dare you to be able to tell much difference at a decent viewing distance. What makes LCD/plasma look more "HD" to people is that these overdrive the colors making the picture look a bit (unnaturally) brighter than it should, making the picture artificially more "vivid" and thus more "clear" and "HD" to people who want to believe that it's somehow better. Also, the way the picture is drawn on LCDs and plasma (and it has nothing to do with the response time of the TV) makes any motion a blurry mess with horrible tearing artifacts everywhere. This doesn't happen on CRT even though it actually has a refresh rate due to the way it is drawn. Something about how the pixels are drawn (staying illuminated, I'll bet) on LCD/plasma makes it this way.
Is "HD" actually better? I can't argue that it isn't. The picture IS actually in "higher definition", technically. However, at this point HD technology is not sufficiently advanced over standard definition to make that much of a difference. LCDs and plasmas (and LCD computer monitors) simply have zero advantages (besides possibly power consumption) over CRT at this time for anyone to waste their money on this horrible stopgap solution pushed onto us by companies tired of people not spending any large amount of money on new televisions.
There, it had to be said.
This is a sig. Deal with it.
Yes - the 60-120FPS thing is a limitation of our current display tech.
Not on CRTs ;) My 1997 Hitachi monitor goes up to 150 Hz. I had a Sony monitor that went up to 200 Hz.
Anyone who can't instantly recognize SD quality is nearly blind, doesn't watch that much HD, doesn't know what "HD" means, or doesn't care that much. Frankly, this last reason is easily enough to add up to 18%, so I'm very surprised the number wasn't higher. Many people probably don't realize that HD refers to the resolution, and doesn't just mean the picture takes up your whole widescreen TV. Okay, so a few people aren't up on the latest abbreviations. I care about that even less than I care about how many people know what HDMI stands for.
But I have to get in my standard rant here. A lot more goes into video resolution than just the number of pixels encoded. If you want to make a comparison between two formats and make arguments about how much better one is, or about who can tell the difference between what, or anything of that sort, you need to know much, much more about how the two were encoded beyond just the fact that one is (for example) a DVD and the other is Blu-Ray. All else being equal, HD is much nicer than SD, and noticeably better than DVD, but many HD evangelists don't seem to care about the role of encoding. If you don't know anything about the encoding details, any comparison is liable to be misleading.
The small hole on the case is easy to miss.
Over 4 out 5 people CAN tell HD from SD.
See how stats can be bent to mean anything?
http://pixelcort.com/
So there's not much vexing in play here.
If you think HD is barely distinguishable from SD, you've seem some REALLY bad HD content.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
What leads me to this question: has anyone ever *seen* an actual 720p HDTV that's bigger than 30"? I haven't found one yet, only ones available are the odd 1300something*700something resolution TVs. SD looks like crap on them and so does real 720p content, since it has to be stretched to that strange resolution. Picture just isn't as clear anymore as when it would be mapped 1:1 to LCD pixels. And it gets worse, 1080i/p content gets downscaled to 720p and then upscaled again, even though it could be downscaled to a 1:1 pixel mapping. Why are they making such crap LCDs? To convince people that what they really want is a 1080 display?
I have a HD cable PVR and a 720p HDTV. My SD feed is greatly improved by the HD PVR solely because it's a better specced box than the standard cable box provided by Virgin Media in the UK.
I believe it is the same here in the UK with the Sky (Fox) satellite boxes; the "HD Ready PVR" has far better decoders than the standard sat receivers on the SD channels as well as the superior digital out HDMI. [Shame its encumbered by the usual DRM]
So a phone poll asking users would be flawed if this is the case in the polls geographiocal catch area.
I know I am way too late to enter this discussion, still I would like to mention that my Panasonic plasma tv does a beautiful upscaling. Frankly, when I was watching Casino Royale (BluRay) on the LCD TV of a friend of mine, I had a headache because the whole thing was too damn sharp, especially with fast movement. I just don't have that problem with upscaled DVDs.
And frankly, while a new release on DVD costs 22 Swiss Francs (about 18 US$) a BluRay is anywhere between 35 and 50 CHF (about 29 to 41 US$). I just don't see even ONE good reason to give the movie industry that kind of money.
The difference between HD and SD? I suspect most would be able to tell the difference in a side by side comparision. The real question is what percentage really care?
they must be nearsighted, like me.
Table-ized A.I.
The headline is all wrong. I am sure others noticed it too!
Gani
No-one buying discs? That's OK - Panasonic is pushing 3D Blu-Ray.
"Standards wars, patent monopolies and the like would seriously interfere with the widespread adoption of any 3D image standard," says Panasonic's Masayuki Kozuka. "So give us your bloody money and don't argue."
The systems will require new players, introduced at $500, and new high-definition televisions. Existing high-definition televisions will be rendered obsolete by the proposal, much as the pre-Blu-Ray "HD-ready" sets were. "Another few thousand is a small price to pay for the very latest in gadgetry. If we dub it 'the third generation of HD,' it should distract the early adopters long enough from lynching us. We'll tell 'em Apple's interested or something."
To keep the "analog hole" closed, viewing will require an orange jumpsuit, handcuffs and sensory deprivation goggles with the displays in the eyepieces. "Any Vista user should be quite accustomed to this."
Blu-Ray discs make up a fantastic 4% of the physical video market, as compared to those old, clunky and frankly rather stale-smelling DVDs which only make up 96% of sales and can't be taken seriously by anyone.
In unrelated news, BitTorrent is now 40% of all Internet traffic, only exceeded by penis spam, while YouTube plays better on 64-bit Linux than Windows Vista.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I have an affluent household. We have several TVs and a Dish DVR that records our favorite shows. And it's nice. So much better than life without a DVR. Ask me six months ago, and I would have raved about my beautiful Dish DVR. Being in control of the TV experience is just... amazing.
But then, something new happened - Netflix released on-demand for Mac OSX. Now, the Mac Mini is the computer upstairs, next to the nice, big, sound system, with a nice, big monitor on it. And so, it was little effort to install Netflix and start watching (older) movies on it immediately.
And I thought DVR had it good!
Quality is good - "feels like DVD" and the hassle factor is just GONE. This is how home media should be. The DVR gets sorta close, but it's just not there. Good quality video, good quality sound, only occasionally noticeable artifacting, and no DVDs to return or lose, no trip to the local video store... just click, wait about 10 seconds, and voila!
I don't give one whit about resolution higher than this if I have to deal with discs, trips, and per-movie charges. Especially if the equipment is expensive.
I bought a projector for a few hundred on eBay that will render the Netflix vids at enormous 5' viewing on a home-projector style fold-out screen.
On demand. No hassle. Big screen. Decent resolution. Great sound. No more "gotchas". Just click, and play!
On demand - it's for me! (now, if only they had a Linux port...)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
To be honest, I find the difference in picture quality between SD Freeview (DVB-T) and SD Freesat (DVB-S) to be greater than that between SD Freesat and HD Freesat.
That's comparing a Freeview tuner built into the TV, and a Freesat set-top box connected to the same TV via HDMI. The compression that is applied to Freeview makes a huge negative impact on the picture quality.
Would be interesting to see what the diff is like for NTSC vs digital. As most people kmow NTSC signal and picture is pretty horrible compared to PAL and SECAM, so I wonder if people think their new TV is great due to the better picture normal SD digital give you?
As others have pointed out a decent upscaled DVD looks near as heck as good as blue-ray/HD-DVD hence why blue-ray isn't catching on like DVD did - there's no discernable difference to most people at home.
What about the other 10%?
Really? That's a great number. People aren't putting screens side-by-side and comparing, they are simply assuming it "must be HD".
What is amazing is that if 18 don't notice that it isn't... then a whopping 82% notice! Even with little experience and no side-by-side. This is a large number!
And in other news, 18% of the Consumers are reportedly suffering from ADHD...
many "consumers" dont even know how to spell HD and SD, these are plain stupid... then there are the eyesight impared, well i hope they didnt count in this survey... last but not least, ppl who just dont care... i myself love HD, even if its only 720p sometimes, far better than the old dvdrips;)
I have a 42" plasma TV, sadly not full HD, only 720p. But at the 10' distance I view it at I don't really notice the lower resolution.
However in terms of DPI is it probably the same as my previous SD CRT display.
As for people thinking SD looks HD, it could be down to the upscaling logic within the HD television actually improving the picture or at least turning a 60Hz signal into 120Hz (perhaps even interpolating between frames using the motion information in the digital signal). I hear that 720p sets are better for this than 1080p, but again, I think it depends on viewing distance.
If you are moving from a mid-range SD CRT that would be typical of the previous generation, to a mid-range LCD, you will probably view the stable solid image as an improvement over the slightly warped CRT image, and not notice the lower contrast ratio. Basically standard technology improvements during the 5 to 10 year lifetime of a television are what people are mistaking for improvements due to HD.
I record about two hours worth a week of it, then filter that to 90 minutes.
Our tv set-up already requires a powered ariel and we have digital tv. I suppose when the tv we have dies we might buy a HD set but those 42 inch screens look like something from the Fahrenheit 451 film.
Since most of tv is junk, i dont see how hi def junk makes much better.
Xbox owners who think that because it says 1080p on the box, that it means their game is HiDef... LOL. Seems they never heard of upscaled SD content.
Well I have been trying to tell this to my overly-dorky friends for years, but it never sinks in. They even hate the features on newer TVs that interpolate frames... Even though most people either don't notice, or like it.
Anyway I regularly download TV shows from iTunes. The HD version is certainly higher-res than the SD version, and if you play at "native" size, you can see the window is larger. If you pause it and look at the screen, you can notice much more detail as well. but.... typically I watch the shows full screen, and there is constant motion (and usually not a lot of sharp lines). Is the HD version slightly sharper? sure, but Guess what? The main noticible difference is my computer runs a lot hotter!
"You should've seen the argument when I blocked the SD channels *grin*."
I think I'd get pissed off too with some geek fucking about with my TV when all I wanted to do was watch the shows and didn't give a stuff about the definition. Get a life.
I have HD kit, but I have spent bucketloads on SD vids and I'm ******rd if I'm gonna spent 40% markup replacing them. Give me 5 years, when the prices drop enough to make it worth my while, when HD vids are $3.99 a disc!
Maybe 18% of the material shown is upscale?
Even though I am a big technology buff, I have not bothered with HDTV yet. Why? Content still stinks. Untill there is something on worth watching, I'll just stick to grabbing those few gems worthy of my time off the Internet.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Games don't do motion blur by just bluring two frames over each other (which would be rather awful), but by recording the velocity vector of a pixel and bluring that pixel with it as post processing effect
That would work for camera pans, where every pixel is moving at close to the same speed. But how do games record the velocity vector of pixels where some objects are moving quickly while others are still?
18% of consumers need their eyes checked.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
If you're in PAL you're probably watching at 60fps with 3:2 pulldown not 24fps. If you watch sources in native 24fps (currently only bluray can do that AFAIK) then there is no issue with panning at all.
There are TVs that can detect that a 60-field broadcast was filmed in 24fps and convert 3:2 to 3:3 for display at 72 Hz.
I have a friend that couldn't tell the difference. I told him to replace his component cables with HDMI cables because without them, his high price HDTV set would downgrade the HD signal to SD and of course he wouldn't see the difference. He swapped the cables and was able to tell the difference.
So what the article should say is that 81% of consumers CAN tell the difference between HD and SD. I wonder what percentage of those surveyed had bad eyesight? I'm pretty sure it's more than 18% of them. This is a non story.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
"My gf routinely has the SD, rather than HD, version of various TV channels on because evidently from her point of view there is no discernable difference."
Every time I see someone using an HD tv with HD channels available but still watching SD, it's always a woman. I guess this completely disproves the old claim that women pay more attention to detail then men!
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
It's depressing that so many folks here are using this survey to blast people as morons. Depressing, but not terribly surprising.
Very, very, very few customers looking to buy a new TV are going to have a clue about things like FPS or pixels or whatever. There's no reaon why they should.
People will judge the quality of a TV's display by looking at it. It seems obvious that, given the variations in our eyesight, a lot of people aren't going to notice the difference between SD and HD, just as a lot of people can't notice the difference between sound reproduced on an audiophile's high-end dream and a $200 box.
It's not important and, frankly, most people don't care about HDTV. If the programming isn't worth watching, who cares about anything else?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
and you just might be right about the "older eyes" thing.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/36608/talkshow-with-spike-feresten-cable-psa
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
It really takes a side-by-side for me. When HD first came out I'd goto Best Buy and frankly spent more time trying to deduce if there was enough difference to warrant $2k - $3k for an HD TV. I determined the difference simply didn't compel me. It still doesn't but as prices drop I'll be more likely to get an HD TV. I don't watch much TV and I certainly could care less if the chick getting banged in my pr0n has a mole on her vulva or not. Hell, I'm only in for 3 minutes then I'm taking asleep!
As stated, it implies that 18% of consumers can't distinguish SD from HD in a direct A/B comparison. I find this frankly unbelievable.
On the other hand, I would not be at all surprised if 18% of consumers, particularly those who don't normally watch HD, might be unable to recognize HD when either SD or HD is shown on an unfamiliar monitor without the opportunity to make a direct A/B comparison.
Another question is whether they were actually being asked to distinguish 480i SD from 720p or 1080i/p HD, or whether the "SD" was really 480p ED. On anything other than a very large-screen monitor, the distinction between ED and HD is fairly subtle. Actually, I expect the percentage of people unable to tell whether a picture is ED or HD would be considerably greater than 18%
I run into a lot of non-tech people who have difficulty understanding the difference between an HD TV and an HD signal. Such people would probably answer the question they thought they were asked, by correctly identifying the TV as being high definition, without ever really understanding that an HD TV can display both HD and SD content.
Yes, the researchers probably explained the difference to the respondents during the course of the study, but many such people still don't understand the difference between HD & SD signals even after you explain it to them.
It's that artificial boost that gets to me. In the same way, I can't stand listening to hi-fi with a "loudness" boost on. I've only watched other people's HD, so maybe I could tweak an HD system to where I'd like it better than my SD CRT TV, with its digital Dish feed (which aside from very slight compression artifacts is crystal clean). Sitting ten feet from that TV, with sound going through a good stereo amplifier, makes for decent entertainment.
Not only do the flatscreen TVs have overly-artificial color and contrast boosts, but the color gamut can be annoying. Yes, the CRT gamut is limited compared to reality. But the plasma screens in particular end up showing colors that just plain don't exist in our natural world. I'd rather have to add to the scene, using my imagination, than subtract from it.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that many people, over or around 18%, need glasses?
The 14'th amendment was was created to be an option.
Hell, I'm just impressed that 82% can. That's more people than know who the vice president is, I think.
I think this shows that the vast majority of people can tell the difference. I think that shows there IS a dramatic difference. I mean, Bush's approval rating is still higher than that.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
I see this on almost every TV channel now. On the NON-HD channel (2, 4, 5, 7, etc) they say "Your watching this channel in HD", and even have the word "HD" embedded into the channel's logo. I can see how this confusion happens.
Most people I know use factory defaults for their SDTVs. They don't adjust the color, sharpness etc. and it usually makes a big difference. If they don't know how to adjust a simple SDTV, what are they odds they can figure out an HDTV?
I've had plenty of friends buy a nice HDTV who were not very impressed until I helped them adjust the settings on their HDTV and cable box. Yes, even the cable box has settings that need to be adjusted for a better picture.
Another problem is that they might not be using the right connection to their TV. Some actually take the composite video connection from their old TV and attach it to the new HDTV. The results are usually not very impressive.
If you did a survey on HDTV owners, how many would know what 720p or 1080i meant? Do they know if they are using an HDMI or component video connection? Are they using upconvert-1, upconvert-2, or passthrough? Do they honestly know if they have an HD capable cable box?
If you work someplace with a lot of CRT monitors and walk around checking them out with your peripheral vision I would expect that nearly all of them are flickering at 60Hz. While some can't tell it's flickering, some do and didn't know it could be fixed.
Do not underestimate the number of ignorant people in this world. 18% seems way too low.
82% of viewers think that the Emperor is a very snappy dresser.
Just after I hit submit I realised the delicious irony of using that film to sell TVs. Oh well, money!
Nick
18% seems like an awfully noninformative number. That is on the curve enough to cover legally blind people, the extra-chromosome set, and any other marginal population that probably also can't distinguish various other nuances.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
You guys should start using standard acronyms for titles. SD doesn't stands for Standard Definition but for Secure Digital, which makes people who use them almost daily think people is confusing High Definition TV with memory cards.
ghostbar page.
The story has misguided much of this audience.
These people are likely to believe that they are viewing HD because they have a digital receiver or purchased a large HD capable TV. A common sales tactic and misconception for non-tech people.
With no real point of reference, it is hard for the person to question the quality of what they believe to be HD.
Chris.
sounds like you are qualified to answer this then:
aren't a lot of broadcasts now done just in hidef (ie football) and then shown either as hidef or downconverted for regular broadcast? I'm assuming this is why a)the graphics are always in stupid places for wide screen tv and b)many of the regular broadcasts look better than they used to.
Yes, sports and live events in particular get that treatment since they typically have their graphics on the fly and need to be able to be down-converted on their way through master control. If you keep all your graphics more than 13% of the way in from each side of a 16:9 image, you can do a center cut to down-convert for 4:3 SD. This is why the graphics all seem so biased to the middle of the HD feed. And I'm so very sorry to piss off the Blu-Rayistas of Slashdot! I never said it was bad format or that you should get the DVD instead of the BD of any given content. I just wanted to comment that a good scaler can fool a lot more than your average mouth-breathing consumer. That's what I get for making sweeping generalizations!
Who said anything about HD-DVD? DIAF.
It's an improvement. Wasn't it 40% or so who thought they were watching hi def and weren't about three years ago?
A conversation aimed at Thanksgiving? I spent some time trying to explain to my aged parents that their "good" analog looked fuzzy to me now and and that, no, hi def wouldn't strain their eyes if they watched it closer than their customary 8-12 feet from their current 32". And I lost.
We have an old boxy TV, no cable--just a VHS/DVD player. If I want to watch TV shows, I go through youtube and other sites. I don't much care about TV anymore. It's fun and I wouldn't mind some channels, but it doesn't matter if I see 11,540 fps. Again... it's cool and all, but I could kinda care less. Just call me a hokey from Mistokey, I guess.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
18% of people in America were found to be utterly stupid.
Rooting for the yankees is like rooting for herpes.
I just got one, it's as simple as that - 50" is great and I can tell the difference, even with my poor eyes.
Well, once again someone has come along with generalizations that don't fit the situation.
The DTB-H260F is a great receiver. The sensitivity is better than or equal to the other units I've compared it to. The feed line is not too long, and is not leaky. It's not cheap coax, it is properly grounded, and the correct connectors are used. I've even used a four foot piece of RG-6 with the receiver sitting right next to the antenna base with the same results.
Your statement that the receiver has poor sensitivity does not take into account the conditions in which the receiver is being used. That's like saying your eyes are in bad shape because you can't make out details on a small sign three miles away without using a telescope.
I'm using a directional antenna that has plenty of good reviews from people using it similar distances from the transmitters, including some amateur radio enthusiasts who know how to test antennas. In fact, it was a friend of mine who is an amateur radio enthusiast, and who also got his degree in antenna design, who suggested I try an amplifier.
It's VTEC, not V-Tech. VTEC is Honda's system that allows the engine computer to select between two different camshaft profiles depending on operating conditions. V-Tech is a company that manufactures consumer electronics. Putting a V-Tech sticker on a car would make no sense, unless the driver is a sales rep for V-Tech.
The simple fact of the matter is that I live in a very mature suburban neighborhood with huge trees all around. The signal maps show that the signal strength is already weak here, and the trees don't help. Before you suggest it, a tall mast is not an option.
Putting moderation advice in your