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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'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'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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It's only really useful for film-based content. Film is shot at 24fps. On a normal 60Hz set, every frame alternates between being repeated 2 times or 3 times (2,3,2,3,2,3,2,3) in order to sync up with the 60Hz refresh rate (it's called 3:2 pulldown). This gives a slight stuttering effect, which is more pronounced during slow sideways panning shots. With displays that have a 120Hz refresh rate, this pulldown is eliminated be repeating every frame 5 times (5*24=120). This gives a more natural and fluid appearance.
Some displays will also use interpolation to "create" frames rather than simply repeating each frame for a set period of time. This technology, IMHO, isn't quite up to snuff and gives films/shows a somewhat odd synthetic appearance. Keep in mind that this tech is separate from the 5:5 pulldown described above.
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.
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.
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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".