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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.
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.
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.
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, i.e. you need only a single frame and a bit more GPU power for the effect. Not all new games do that, but quite a few.
However there are TVs that interpolate inbetween frames, like Sony's 200Hz Motionflow, which takes a regular 25Hz input signal and then calculates the inbetweens to fill it up to 200Hz. There is similar stuff from other companies too.