Slashdot Mirror
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'm half blind, and SD makes me want to gouge my eyes out after watching HD.
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...
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
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.
To avoid criticism; Say nothing, Do nothing, Be nothing.
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.
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.
20 year old eyes are much better than 50 year old eyes. I wonder how many of the 18% are older folks? I'm 55 and I'm hard-pressed to distinguish between SD and HD.
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 it ready for the hood? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OIbQDAlAjM
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
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
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.
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.
80% of consumers can't tell 192kbps mp3 from FLAC. 70% of comsumers can't tell IE from Firefox. 60% of consumers can't tell their head from their ass. Your point?
Of course I've pulled these numbers out of my ass, where I pull 63% of all statistics I post on Slashdot.
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.
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.
Generally SD looks noticeably better when upscaled on a respectable HDTV. Especially when the person has upgraded from a CRT, old rear projection or some older not so good panel TV. Also, a current HDTV will have superior colour &/ contrast (often artificially boosted) than the older SD screen.
These factors would account for a good fraction of the statistic the being rest of the would be accounted for by the Idiot Factor - or to be fair, that many people have slightly off eyesight, or may be just sitting too far away.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
... 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.
This is the best restaurant I ever eat in
And in other news: 82% of people CAN tell the difference between SD and HD.
www.cowclops.net/resolutionchart1.png
You want your optimal viewing distance to be on the line for whichever format you watch the most of, which is about where you'd notice the quality difference between that and the next worst format. If you have a TV smaller than 42" or so or you're sitting very far away for whatever screen size you have, you won't be able to tell the difference.
And yes, I'm going too post this on every "Stupid people can't tell SD from HD" story until people stop asserting that HD isn't that much of an improvement over SD. I use a 720p projector on a 65" screen that I sit 10 feet away from and Transformers on HD-DVD looks CONSIDERABLY better than Transformers on DVD.
18% of audiophiles were surprised that they could tell no difference between sound coming through standard 18 gauge wiring and sound coming through $200 per foot premium cables. The other 82% of audiophiles distinctly heard the difference. However, it turns out that the engineers performing the test forgot to actually switch over from the cheap ones to the expensive ones so both tests were on the same cheap wires.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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 are catching on to the "sample-and-hold" effect that even the fastest response-time LCDs produce loads of motion blur on account that they hold the image rather than scan-strobe it as a traditional video monitor. Google "LCD motion blur sample and hold" to see what people say on this.
About 70% of consumers think that hooking up an HDTV to an SDTV cable box makes it HDTV. And 99% of consumers don't realize that the big box stores have a nasty habit of piping SDTV into the cheaper HDTVs while the expensive boxes get the real deal.
They can't tell, but I see a world of difference, and that's all that matters.
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!
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.
Who gives a shit? 18% of the people probably still think the world is flat. I bet a lot of those people said that because they're resisting buying a new TV.. or, like my Mom, who bought a new SD TV 4 years ago, and really doesn't want to buy a new one yet.
Where's this story: 82% of the people think that HD television is better than SD television. If that's not news worth, why is this?
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
18% of consumers can't tell the difference.
72% can.
Misleading facts and poor mathematics.
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.
The previous message was brought to you by the National Cyclops Council.
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
It's depressing that so many folks here are using this survey to blast people as morons. Depressing, but not terribly surprising.
Very, very, very few customers looking to buy a new TV are going to have a clue about things like FPS or pixels or whatever. There's no reaon why they should.
People will judge the quality of a TV's display by looking at it. It seems obvious that, given the variations in our eyesight, a lot of people aren't going to notice the difference between SD and HD, just as a lot of people can't notice the difference between sound reproduced on an audiophile's high-end dream and a $200 box.
It's not important and, frankly, most people don't care about HDTV. If the programming isn't worth watching, who cares about anything else?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
It really takes a side-by-side for me. When HD first came out I'd goto Best Buy and frankly spent more time trying to deduce if there was enough difference to warrant $2k - $3k for an HD TV. I determined the difference simply didn't compel me. It still doesn't but as prices drop I'll be more likely to get an HD TV. I don't watch much TV and I certainly could care less if the chick getting banged in my pr0n has a mole on her vulva or not. Hell, I'm only in for 3 minutes then I'm taking asleep!
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.