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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 have a HDTV and can tell the difference but don't care. I am not willing to pay the price difference for HD tv shows. My HDTV isnt going to waste tho, I do use it for high def gaming.
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...
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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.
It is still important. I can most definately tell if what I'm watching is from a crappy VHS or from a DVD. That was obvious the first time I ever saw a movie on DVD. Walked in a room, saw people watching a DVD movie, and was like "Wow....so thats a DVD movie eh?". An HD source vs an SD source (to be fair, I'm talking about a movie or TV show... other kinds of content will be easier) gets a lot trickier.
I remember last time I brought my Xbox 360 to a family member's place. All of their TV's HDMI connectors were taken (which is what I normally use), so I brought the component cables (which can do 720p just fine). Since I had never used component, the console went back to default: 4:3, 480 lines. After playing a few hours, I started noticing something weird.... the ratio (the game i was playing didn't make it totally obvious like most would). So I went in the config to set it back to 16:9, when I noticed... 480 resolution? The hell? Switched it back up to 720p... There was a difference, but it wasn't all that obvious (no, it wasn't one of those 520p games that they upscale).
I'm sure I'm not the majority and that most people would have been able to tell much faster, but point still stands though: for a large amount of people its fairly irrelevent if you give them HD for a month or a year. As long as there's no artefact in the picture (like VHS), how many pixels you pump in Sex in the City won't matter.
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
Last I heard the only things actually broadcast in HD are the World series and the Super Bowl, so yeah, I'd say that if you're watching a lot of broadcast TV but not much sports, you're just as well off getting a 720p anyway.
Incidentally, I spend a lot of time answering questions about TVs, selling them is part of my job. Funny thing though, all of our display model HDTVs are playing a looped DVD over split coax that isn't even terminated on the unused outlets... people will stand there oohing and ahhing over how great the picture is despite the fact that it is absolutely not HD in any way shape or form. Makes it pretty hard to convince people Sony sets are worth more than Olevia ones, too.
This headline comes as so little a surprise to me that I have trouble believing anyone even doubts it.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
... 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.
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I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they are less concerned with the quality difference between the SD and HD stations than they are with how much slower their channel surfing is with the HD versions.
I waited until this was consistently, noticeably no longer the case before buying a plasma. I still would not by an LCD, although the higher end Sony 1080p models are starting to look pretty amazing when set up with optimal source material.
I also had a decent Sony CRT, which I gave to my parents when I got a Panasonic plasma. Although I thought after a while that maybe the plasma wasn't *that* much better, I have since been and re-watched the Sony, and frankly the plasma blows it back into last century, where it belongs. You just cannot beat the clarity (not to mention size and response time) of plasmas IMHO.
Read Pynchon.
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.
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.
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.
Time Warner in Charlotte, NC advertises "Free HD, for only $9.95 more a month, while out competitors (satellite) charge more than $100 a year for the same service".
Being that my brain hurts whenever I get close to figuring out how $9.95 a month is "free", and being that my soul hurts for paying the fools that would be proud of $9.95 a month compared to $100 per year, I'm not amicable to explanations as to why I should consider $9.95 a month to mean "free".
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.