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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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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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... 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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".
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.