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Widescreen TVs in the US?
Steeldrivin asks: "What's up with widescreen TV, in the US? If you go to the widescreen TV website for Philips, you'll see that they have a bunch of cool widescreen TVs...but only in Europe. The US catalog is devoid of widescreen products unless you want to spend $10,000 for a flat-screen plasma model. The catalog for Great Britain, on the other hand, has CRT-based 28" and 32" models, that are probably much more affordable.
As far as other manufacturers are concerned, the only widescreen models seem to be the more expensive plasma units, or huge projection TVs. What's up with this? When will the US get affordable widescreen TVs?" Philips' US catalog can be found here.
The problem with adoption of this stuff here in God's Country is that the various broadcasters and media companies are the FCC's puppetmasters.
;)
The current plan is for NTSC broadcasts to end in 2006, and for HDTV to completely replace it. Consumer electronics companies like this because then everyone will have to buy new TVs, VCRs (or better yet, DVDs - read only as a plus) etc.
However, HDTV only really seems to be working when broadcast from towers. Not over cable, and not over satellites. Broadcast ground transmissions frequently get messed up, and in the digital world, if it's not a 1, it's a 0; You either get a perfect picture or you don't get the time of day.
Additionally, a large investment will have to be made to install the HDTV transmitting equipment, and more power is required for the signal.
So far it sounds like it would all work out cool in the end if only the cable and sat companies would get on with transmitting HDTV.
Bzzt, wrong. The current scheme allows broadcasters to send either a really ultra-high quality channel or several low quality channels. Now given that ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC (and even UPN and WB) have been bought by big conglomerates who have additional channels providing a not-inconsiderable revenue stream, who really thinks that we can expect to see a single good channel instead of loads of crap.
So the outlook for HDTV is pretty dismal, and it's really a necessity for getting those widescreen sets out into the market, cheaply. (heck, it even requires people to get new TABLES! the electronics companies must love this)
Personally, I'm waiting for HDVT, so I can buy a 160 character wide vterm, with ultra-high-resolution characters in a single technicolor
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Well, of course the special effects in most books are more real than any of the pap they put on the screen in movies or television programs. When you read a book the effects are rendered in pure wetware. With any movie or television program, it has to go through many layers of conversion before it gets to the wetware (where it all happens anyway, ya know). Conversion losses all over the place. Who really cares that they were able to simulate all that stuff and make flashy light appear on a wall? Thats for rubes who can't render a damn thing in their minds. Poor fools.
Here in the UK, the BBC and others are commited to broadcasting a lot of widescreen content. Most new BBC productions are now widescreen, including stuff like soaps (Eastenders).
That and the fact we have digital TV available, are driving the sales of widescreen TV sets, I'd imagine.
--
It's an amazing situation, and surprisingly few people know about it. The "terrestrial" (RF link from transmitter antenna to receiver antenna) standard adopted by the USA has such severe problems with multipath as to be useless in many urban areas with indoor antennas. (This was known a year ago, at the NAB Symposium (?) held in Washington, DC. I was there.) Digital TV (not all digital TV is HDTV, btw) really should be able to use the same paths (terrestrial RF, cable, and satellite) as used by analog TV (NTSC, PAL, SECAM). In all but the USA (and possibly Argentina), the terrestrial RF link uses a system called COFDM (coded orthogonal frequency-division multiplex, iirc) that is marvelously resistant to degradation by multipath interference. There's even an anecdote about the coax. from a DTV receiver that was connected to nothing at the far end, and someone stuck a bent paper clip into the center conductor, and got a good picture. The transmitter antenna wasn't right next door, either. COFDM is great, very succesful for mobile and portable reception, but 8VSB is useless for both of those. COFDM even uses the reflections of multipath to enhance the signal. The US terrestrial DTV broadcast standard is ATSC (Advanced TV Systems Committee, iirc), and it specifies a modulation scheme that uses vestigial sideband (VSB), with the digital data transmitted 3 bits at once (must be) by choosing one of eight levels. Multipath echoes confound this signal easily and make it unusable. (The bit rate (or baud) is quite high.) Any multipath echo will arrive long after a given 3-bit level has been sent, and is quite likely to confound the transmitted levels. Since most of DTV's potential viewers live in environments subject to multipath, they will require the likes of 30-foot towers and (likely) highly-directional antennas aimed carefully, just to obtain a decent signal. Rotators will be required if there are geographically separate transmitter antenna sites. (I posted a message to a mailing list about how channel surfers would require fast servos, and reinforced antennas and towers, and also who would be the first to have a chimney torn apart by too much channel surfing. The story was included in the next issue of the newsletter.) In tests (reported at the NAB Symposium in Washington a year ago), indoor antennas were often useless, or required locating at certain place (not necessarily convenient!) in an apartment, and careful aiming. Many apartments simply couldn't use indoor antennas. The standard-setters in the USA are in a fantastic state of denial about this dirty secret. The broadcasters are worried. If you have DTV broadcasts in ypour area, try to contact the chief engineer at the station, and see what he (or she!) says. While COFDM is not 100% better (only maybe 98%?), its usage in the UK has proven to be extremely successful. Other European countries are having similar good luck, and mobile reception is just fine. // COFDM uses oodles of narrow-band carriers (something like 2,000, iirc) that individually have a quite-low bit rate. Schemes generally like those used to encode CD audio (I think COFDM uses Reed-Solomon coding) protect the data. The receivers can ignore a few carriers, if there's narrow-band interference. Guard bands (apparently periods when there's no data) help accomodate multipath, as I understand it. // Btw, I saw HDTV on a Philips 16:9 studio CRT monitor withh about a 33 inch (0,9 metre?) diagonal, in the harris DTV truck. It was from a satellite downlink, and the program material (a travelogue, low-altitude aerial shots over Ireland) was gorgeous. Image quality was so good that it was almost painful to stop watching it. Think high-quality travel poster, not bleached by the sun, in a travel agency. After making such wild statements, I feel terribly irresponsible not to have a URL to go to; my sources have been industry insiders, including forwards from the OpenDTV mailing list, which carries the comments by Dermot Nolan and Craig Birkmaier; also a newsletter put out by Larry Bloomfield. I have saved some verbose text on this topic, though. Perhaps the best source for the truth is Sinclair Broadcasting, which held some serious tests recently to compare 8VSB with COFDM. I believe Sinclair is in the Baltimore area. // If you think Microsoft is out to give Linux a bad name, the pro-8VSB characters are doing something similar (more like ostriches with heads a foot below grade level, though). I apologize for the disorganization of this message, as well; I really wanted to get the word out, and would edit the text if I could. Currently, the response online is frustratingly erratic (must be very busy!), which didn't help. Sorry for any remaining typos! I do know how to spell.
Legacy hardware/software addict. Midnight hacker, 1960. Codepage 819 in DOS: Total Latin-1 compatibility (no boxes/lines
Widescreen is becoming increasingly popular here in the UK. They are roughly 50% more expensive than a non-widescreen model which makes a typical 28" about 700 UKP and a 32" anywhere from 900 UKP upwards. With DVD taking off over here aswell I think that they will be better selling than 4:3 models _very_ soon (1-2 years). ;)
I must admit to being surprised that the US is lagging behind - at least we've beaten you guys to something!
PAL systems (including PAL Plus) use 625 horizontal lines of information. Of those 625, around 400 go to video, and the rest are used for sound, teletext, etc.
PAL Plus is compatible with PAL. That means you can watch PAL Plus programs on a standard TV (of course, you'll see the black bars). What PAL Plus does is to send encoded information hidden in the lines that are carrying the black bars. This encoded information is only readable by PAL Plus TV sets. Regular PAL TV sets will discard it and only show those 2 black bars.
These encoded lines contain video signal destined to improve/enhance the quality of the image. For example:
If 30% of the video carrier is encoded info for the PAL Plus video signal, what you get is the remaining 70% improved by 30%. Therefore: you get full quality picture on a wide screen TV set.
If, OTOH, you have a PAL (without the Plus) wide screen TV set, you are not decoding that info. That means you are ONLY zooming the image to make it fit your screen. I wouldn't recommend that. Yes, you watch the programs in wide screen, but you're losing image resolution!
Buying a PAL (without the Plus) widescreen TV, or broadcasting in the same manner, is just plain stupid when PAL Plus gives better image quality to widescreen TV owners and remians 100% compatible with regular PAL.
Yes, movies are filmed in widescreen (16:9)format, but is this really any better than the existing standard (4:3) format?
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Speaking from personal experience...I'd much rather view something on a 4:3 device than on a 16:9 device. You can digest the information much faster when it is contained inside a square area. You don't have to scroll your eyes (or worse, your head) back and forth as much.
Besides, anyone who make a movies these days are thinking ahead to video and TV playback. They make sure they can fit what's important in a 4:3 area, while the rest of the scene is useless fluff or scenery. If they can't fit it all in, they play that clever trick where they squash the scene to make more of it fit in the same horizontal space.
The only movies that truely look wrong on 4:3 are the really, really old ones that weren't planning on the television format. As a result, part of the key action is cut off or they have to digitally zoom the image and pan around.
Any movie made from 1980 onward is going to look fine on a 4:3 device. I don't see that this is likely to change considering the length of time it would take for 16:9 to trickle down. During this period, people with 16:9 devices will have to play 4:3 content with black bars on either side or chop the top and bottom off of the 4:3 image. This is exactly why people argue you should by 16:9 in the first place...so you don't have to see black bars or cut off part of the scene.
Clearly, it's a no-win situation...I say follow the standards that computers use. We still don't have a TV that can match the clarity of a plain old 640 x 480 VGA monitor. If the TV industry wanted to truly impress the viewing public, they would quit the @#%@#% interlacing and just display a static image (thankfully, there's at least one most of HDTV that uses a non-interlaced display mode).
Just my thoughts...
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
[Actually, I'm sillywiz@excession.demon.co.uk, but everytime I've ever tried to create an account it's failed...]
The licence fee that most Americans seem to regard as something archaic is partly what drives this stuff. The BBC for example just started doing both widescreen and digital broadcasts. Few people could receive them, but because they're not a commercial organisation they don't have to justify things the same way. Having the broadcasts means that the TV sets will sell and the tech gets bootstrapped that way. The US is more hamdstrung because no-one's going to start broadcasting until there are sets to watch it on and no one's going to buy a set without broadcasts. Unless they're rich, in which case they'll buy a TV for what most people spend on a car.
The BBC is a relatively massive organisation, it has large budgets, a worldwide audience and a remit to make the best television it can. It can afford to bear the "losses" of being a field leader, where commerical television simply couldn't.
Actually the decent widescreen TVs still aren't *THAT* cheap in the UK. The cheapest ones are maybe 4x the cost of similar spec normal TV, but the prices are dropping astonishingly fast - especially as digital takeup is picking up. I think I'm almost the last of my circle of friends to get digital... (I'm trying to watch less TV. I can't help but think that suddenly having 30 channels instead of 5 won't help.)
Britain also has the advantage of being smaller: there are less transmitters and equipment needed, we can be covered by one satalite's footprint. This just helps our TV market be more nimble.
REAL Men/Women check their posts for spelling and grammar errors before they rip everyone about their relative level of intelligence.
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Just something I "observered" about your post.
[mutter] Flamebait [/mutter]
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
"Checksum"? Isn't that the sort of thing those guys with those big room-sized Automatic Data Processing Machines would use? :-)
According to this TV Systems: A Comparison page, one PAL advantage is:
That stuff was done before anything we'd think of as a "checksum" in the digital sense would fit inside a TV, as far as I know - it's all analog....
Here's the WorldWide TV Standards - A Web Guide main page, with information on TV broadcast standards; unfortunately, I didn't see anything there that said what the memoire is avec which the French SECAM system comes; how exactly does it differ from PAL?
You can get wide-format monitors with the SGI name on them from a variety of places; Number Nine sells (at least in the US; their online store only sells in the US) the Digital Flat Panel Solution Pack for PC's (and I think they had a package for Macs as well), which includes a Revolution IV-FP video card and the SGI monitor. It's probably available from various distributors as well. It comes with drivers for operating systems from Redmond; Accelerated-X also includes drivers, as does, I think, the latest XFree86. (I see nothing in the graphics card section of the BeOS Ready List for Intel about it, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there's no OS/2 drivers for it, either, alas, as, when I get a second disk for my home machine, I'd be tempted to install those on it as well, just to see what they're like....)
The ones you installed are presumably CRTs; this one is an LCD, and thus presumably not so heavy (or bulky)...
...and give you 1600x1024 as well.
The price on Number Nine's online store is about USD 2800, but I got mine for about USD 2200, at least several months ago - I seem to remember the list price being less than USD 2800 when I bought it, so maybe it's gone up; I don't know what the price would be outside the US.
And don't even get me started with those top loading washers. I had one of those ruin a perfectly fine t-shirt because i didn't turn it inside out and the pole(more of a screw) that sticks out in the middle of the washer basically ripped the not-so-well attached picture of the front of the t-shirt. I'm scared(living now in US) to put stuff in those archaic remainders that are supposed to wash clothes(without destroing them). How about a nice steel drum with now poles loadable from the side thank you..
And the toilets.. do you really need to put a gallon of water just sitting in the bowl? How about making the bowl look less like a wide cup and more like a shallow glass. That thing just wastes water so enormously.
Showers.. uhh.. never seen a decent way to control the water in showers in US. Sometimes there is one turn-knob that controls both the temperature and the pressure of the water. You pull the thing out(basically on and off only) or, worse, have to turn it to make the water flow. How about separating the temperature controller(totally) from the pressure control. Wouldn't necessarily have to use full pressure to take a shower but rather something milder AND still be able to control the temperature well.
And the 110v electricity. With all the plugs POLARISED. Yes.. they are specifically marked for for the hot and cold wires thus letting the people designing the stuff that is connected to them take advantage of this(a BIG no-no when designing anything connected to the power grid). And then people travel to europe and use a plug-converter (maybe with a transformer if they're smart) and get electricuted because of the bad design. All of the stuff that i have in my apartment right now only plugs in to the outlet ONE way. And what about the power losses with residential power transfer.. P=I^2*R && P=UI.. Thus to deliver the same amount of power to the appliances one has to double the current which means quadrupleing the power loss of transfering the electricity.
You could probably be saving much more than 25l waters weekly by just having a decent washer, shower and a toilet. Americans are less than 4% of the worlds population but yet they consume over 30% of its resources. I wonder if it could be the lavish way of life and the archaich designs that waste some much resources that cause this?
Regardles of the previous things I kind of like it in US. Everything is cheaper, not necessarily of terribly high quality(unless it's imported) but still okay. It costs less to buy a big mac meal than it costs to buy just the burger in most european countries. Computers are cheaper(about the only technological thing in which US. really is the leader in the world) internet is fairly cheap and widely in use. If only they'd stop being so naive about the rest of the world and open their eyes for all the improvements they could get from us. And stop talking about money all the time..
Is it worth bothering to broadcast widescreen on execrable NTSC 525 line systems? Much about US consumer goods is so retro-third world. A dogdy cell-phone network, cookers that my mum would have thrown in the 50s and those weird upright washing machines with separate spin system that take up most of a small condo and need their own reservoir to fill, light switches made of Bakelite!!! America is so protectionist and isolationist that it is probably not worth Europeans exporting decent stuff.
While the vertical resolution of NTSC is poor, us European console gamers are in awe of your 60Hz refresh (vs our 50Hz).
So it's swings & roundabouts, innit.
Hope HDTV gets here soon, and is cheap enough.
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Widescreen TV is 'super lekker' (jolly good, in Dutch), but what I would like is widescreen monitors (or maybe tallscreen?)
I heard talk about this a few years back, but have never seen anything like this since then except in a publishing house (on SGI I think). At the moment my only option to get documents up side by side is to run at eye crunching resolutions, or get a twin-head setup and buy a new desk.
Actually what I really want is a 180 degree wraparound high-res monitor, with me in a delux swivel chair in the middle. So I can play at being the badguy from a Bond movie, 'So Mr. Gates, you thought you could defeat me! MuHaHaHa..'
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
> if you have a choice between 10 different brands or product X, there is competiton between the different brands to make the "best" product.
Perhaps you are defining "best" to be "whatever people buy the most of", but I don't buy that definition.
There is competition among producers be the best producer, ie. to sell the most product or to make the most profit, not to make the highest quality, innovative product. As in any evolutionary scenario, the actors act in *their own* best interest, no-one elses.
To make the best product is one way for a producer to get ahead, but is is often a difficult way. Alternatives are good marketing, cheap product, good *looking* product, sweatshop labour, cheap but polluting manufacturing methods, dumbing down the consumers, products that wear out quickly and of course, vendor lock-in. Market dominance by one company is only one possible problem. Sadly, increased competition encourages manufacturers to cut corners in order to compete.
Which is why you can get 10 different brands of toaster, all of them cheap crap. Which is why, last time I was in the US, I could get 20 kinds of salad dressing, and all the ones that I tried tasted sickly-sweet.
> they don't make em like they used to
And this is in spite of lots of competition. Because producers, even under competition, act in thier own best interests, not yours.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Those tiny, underpowered "fuel-efficient" cars don't sell well in the States. Maybe it's because our land mass is so much larger, so we have so much farther to go. :-) When I went to get a car recently, I started out thinking about saving some money, but the efficient models I tried just cramped me to no end.
Not necessarily. A channel can focus down to a particular niche, like Sci-fi fans or housewives, and can give advertisers the people they actually want to reach, as oppossed to a general channel that has to cater to everyone. So while there are fewer viewers per channel, the advertisers are willing to pay more because there reaching the right people.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
I think there is something wrong with having lots of channels : the more they are, the less audience each of them has, because the size of the market is still the same. And the less audience they get the more they show advertising to pay for the programs. And since they don't get as much money, they have to buy crappy programs and make endless reruns. So in the end you get 200 channels with 50% commercials and 50% crappy reruns, instead of 5 or 10 better quality channels.
Unless of course you pay extra for some channels, but most people don't want to do that.
In France, multi-format TVs are pretty common (though not universal). This is probably due the fact that they're stuck with a TV standard (SECAM) that no-one else other than Russia uses. Multi-format TVs let them view TV from other nearby European nations (the UK, Germany, etc.). I know of several people in France that view UK satellite TV using a multi-format TV. I suspect multi-format TVs haven't caught on elsewhere because there's no real demand without which prices aren't driven down. In France, there is a demand, and multi-format TVs are barely more expensive than a regular TV.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
In the late 80's - early 90's Apple sold black and white portrait displays which were the size of a portrait-oriented 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper.
;)
You didn't have to scroll. And because black and white monitors use a continuous coat of phosphor, rather than small but discrete rgb phosphors, it's easier on the eyes.
Wish I had one - perfect for long stretches of typing and some composition. (21" b&w for better composition of course
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Actually, the American DTV technical standards are pretty well settled in at this point. The only half-way outstanding question is which copy-protection scheme will be used for the box-to-box connection (cable to TV, etc), and at this point 5C seems to have it sewn up. Thomson and Zenith seem to have lost their battle to keep home video recorders a viable product.
A six-month-old overview of the standards situation can be found online at Communications Engineering & Design magazine.
Many questions remain, however, in the non-technical areas. A huge battle lies ahead in determining who's going to make all the money from the "extra" bandwidth that the stations have. The stations would like to sell it themselves, but the networks have other plans.
In that vein, CBS had been the big champion of using the extra bandwidth for HDTV, since they had only the one program stream. With the recent sale to Viacom, they might well change their tune to preferring non-HDTV multicasting of all of Viacom's programming.
The other battle is between the broadcasters and the cable operators. The cable operators see DTV as added competition and don't see how DTV makes them any money, so they're not enthusiastic about it.
Additionally, the sets still cost $3000+ to get. And the costs have not come down drastically from when they were first released. If, in 2005, these sets still cost in excess of $1000, I suspect you're going to see some major lawmaking either pushing the cost of sets way lower, or pushing back the transition date.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
If you noticed, though, the way that they achieved their "widescreenness" was to stretch out the width of the picture, distorting the image.
That was common when widescreen sets first hit the UK market. Fewer channels supported them then, so the demonstration models in shops were showing horse racing[1] stretched horizontally.
Nowadays, when watching a channel that's not broadcasting in 14:9 or 16:9 ratios, stretching the picture to fit is still an option for those who really dislike black bands to the left and right of their pictures.
-Stephen
[1]: I generally only go into town on Saturdays. In the UK, Channel 4 seems to show a lot of horse racing on Saturdays. I've probably seen more demo TVs showing horse racing than any other programme :-)