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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.)
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.
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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.
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.
I can tell the difference, and I don't care too much about the quality improvement. The primary reason I like the digital channels is that they are true 16:9 widescreen. Opening up the edges of the scene makes a much bigger difference than the horizontal resolution, as far as I'm concerned.
Of course, that only applies to regular television shows. Camera operators have been trained for decades to keep the camera tight on the subjects. Thus the extra detail is not needed. If you're talking about a complex scene like sports, however, all bets are off. I don't usually watch football (save for the Superbowl), but even a blind man can tell that an HD picture shows you more of the action than an SD picture. :-)
BTW, one reason why many people can't tell the difference is that the LCD or Plasma screens are already WAY sharper than the CRTs people used to watch. In result, even an SD signal looks a lot better. (Unless you're playing video games. Then SD looks worse.)
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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.
There is even better evidence that the HD providers are compressing the channels and the HD streams they are watching aren't actually HD quality representations of the original content.
I don't have cable tv myself but a friend who does remarked at how sharp my TV was when watching a Blueray DVD. Even the over the air TV stations were coming in more clear then his Cable HD was on most channels. I took the DVD over to his house and we hooked it up, the comparisons where amazingly different. The HD channels he had (some basic HD package with his cable provider) looked like watching older DivX standard videos with a 340 size or something. All the blacks and fields of the same color were blotchy and blocky, there was a considerable lag between scenes and so on. When we connected the Blueray and watched Narnia or something stupid like that. The picture was every bit as sharp as mine even though we had separate TVs.
Gamers and so on might be able to tell the difference in a lot of this but I think that most cable/satellite HD content isn't actually HD in it's delivery so most people also haven't experienced real HD long enough to know the difference.
The primary reason I like the digital channels is that they are true 16:9 widescreen. Opening up the edges of the scene makes a much bigger difference than the horizontal resolution, as far as I'm concerned.
Except, frustratingly, they're often not.
Here's what usually happens: No one wants to put those vertical bars up. So when showing a 4:3 show on your 16:9 screen, they usually scale it -- which looks awful (squashed). This is true whether it's an SD feed scaled up, an HD version of a movie that was simply shot in 4:3, or even an SD clip in an otherwise widescreen show.
Worse are the widescreen shows broadcast as 4:3 SD -- then you've got a little widescreen box right in the middle of your bigger widescreen TV.
It's maddening.
I'm going to say that, once again, broadcast TV fails. Why would I want to watch the show all censored, with ads every 5 minutes (and some in the middle of the show), compressed to hell, and now they even fuck up the aspect ratio, when I can just head over to my nearest torrent site^W^WNetflix queue and get a much higher quality version that just works on my computer?
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