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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.)
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.
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.
Try this - you may notice the difference after all. Honestly, it's not *that* hard to spot: Vid comparison of 24fps versus 60fps
They always shoot (or at least play) films at 25/30fps, and that irritates me no end. They basically look quite jerky when you know what to look for.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
There's no such thing as HD rabbit ears, or a HD antenna*. Antenna manufacturers like to pretend that you need special equipment, but US DTV is broadcast on a subset of the frequencies used for OTA NTSC. Any existing antenna will work fine.
* You might handle multipath differently, and the UHF range is a little smaller, but that's about it.
High Definition TV != Digital TV mandated throughout the US although it becomes possible to transmit DHTV over the air when the switch is made. This too is often a common misunderstanding.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
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.
Yes - the 60-120FPS thing is a limitation of our current display tech. However, OLED potentially at least has the ability to display blinding frame rate speeds (never mind the blurring aspect, as OLED has a response time in the micro seconds - 500x faster than LCD).
OLED can turn pixels on and off in microseconds. So does DLP, which uses pulse width modulation on each micromirror to create shades of gray. Yet there really isn't a lot of 120 fps material to display, unless these 120 Hz TVs are doing motion vector interpolation on the 24 to 60 fps input signals.
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.
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!
I totally agree. The linked video was useless as a comparison, because the video itself was running at 24fps. I did notice a difference on the bouncing ball (the 2nd ball is relevant, the first is just camera technique and you could make it look similarly blurry at 60fps if you wanted), but I could not see any difference in the ut2k4 side by side. Nor should I have been able to according to scientific fact.
For gaming I do think having a higher fps (e.g. 60) is better. This is because the frame rate isn't constant but depends on how much work the graphics card is doing. The frame rate drops when you have water, reflections, rockets exploding all around you etc. If you get 60fps normally, this means you have some room for your frame rate to drop to drop without looking jerky.
As for movies and TV, I'm sorry that the OP can't enjoy them, unlike normal people (it is possible he's not making up his complaining and just has extraordinarily good vision). They have, to my knowledge, always been screened at 24fps or thereabouts and will always be broadcast at a similar rate. Any extra frame rate is just wasted.
You're quite right that the 60fps version had a few glitches in it (thanks to bad video quality). It's surprisingly hard to get smooth and fast video on the PC for various reasons, unless you know what exact codecs to use.
An earlier post mentioned this comparison which is probably better:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1069482
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Of all of that... Nova is the only thing I can think of that's worth
the HD treatment. Even then, the niftiness of Nova is limited to
broadcast where you can be assured that the original absurdly high
bitrate is reaching your TV set.
The rest are more than adequately displayed in 480p widescreen.
Dr Who isn't even something they want to produce in HD. They're
worried the detail resolution will show everyone how crappy their
props are.
HD is a fix for an artificial problem: Namely crappy SD digital broadcasts.
Beating a crap SD digital cable signal is easy. Beating a quality
480p SD source (transcoded or not) is a little harder.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I wonder why the people who complain about 75 Hz CRT monitors being flickery are perfectly willing to work in 50/60 Hz lamp flicker.
1) They aren't staring at the lamp for 8 hour a day.
2) Incandescant bulbs don't actually flicker on/off, they just deviate a little. Think about how it works, when the current changes direction, and the power drops off, yes the light emitting filament starts to cool down but it stays glowing plenty long enough to still be glowing at nearly full brightness when the power comes back up the other side. So instead of '100%-0%-100%-0%' its more a slightly wiggling 100%-95%-100%-95% and few humans can see this slight brightness wobble.
3) As for flourescents, the older ones actually WERE horrible, and people OFTEN complained of headaches after working under them. Modern flourescents though, with modern ballast technology, cycle much faster, and are much less of a problem for people.
Have you talked to your friendly RF-Guy lately? That trade is a black art.
this is my sig, there are many like it, but this one is mine.
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
Lamp flicker is at 100/120 Hz (two power "boosts" during each sinus cycle doubles the frequency).
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
AC power is almost universally a sine wave (or close) with a frequency of 50 or 60 Hz (i.e. cycles per second). Each cycle contains two peaks, one negative and one positive. As a light bulb works equally well irrespective of the direction of current, you get a 100 or 120 Hz cycle in the power output.