Cable and satellite decoder boxes, if they output digitally (and if they do, it looks like it’s going to be via Firewire, aka IEEE-1394, aka i.link), it will be scrambled. Not sure what it will be for terrestrial broadcasts, but let’s face it, if the networks can prevent you from recording programming, they will.
BTW, about those digital (D-VHS) VCRs - I may have spoken a little too soon. Yes, they are capable of recording HDTV; they’ll record any digital signal you feed into them. The problem is having a display device with a digital input that can accept the digital output of the VCR.
It might be a bit premature to say that the HDTV format is here to stay. The video industry is fighting for a new standard for high-def content that keeps it encrypted all the way through the display device. That means that any TV that doesn’t accept a DVI input with an encryption chip will not display the highest resolution formats. And that’s all a lot of commercial content will be available in. Essentially, the movie industry doesn’t want their intellectial copy ‘in the clear’ at any resolution above DVD.
Whack-a-Mole posted:
First, thanks for the in-depth and easy-to-understand information! MUCH appreciated.
However, late last year, I was TV shopping, and I ran across several standard TV sets (25 to 32 inch) with different resolutions-- everything from 400 lines to 805 lines.
Are these the same resolutions you were referring to, or could the “805 lines of horizontal resolution” touted on one set mean something else?
And… if they are actually different, would resolutions above 480 lines be better or worse (since 480 seems to be the native resolution of the broadcast)?
Thanks in advance,
David
Having an SDTV set capable of more than 480 (or 525) lines of resolution is essentially marketing. Although it can give you a general idea of the quality of the set, the video signals that they are capable of displaying cannot carry any more than 480 lines.
If you are familiar with computer monitor specs, it’s pretty much the same thing. For a given aspect ratio (4:3) and horizontal and vertical refresh rate, there is only one possible resolution. Since the aspect ratio (4:3), horizontal refresh rate (60hz[sup]1[/sup] interlaced) and vertical refresh rate (14.x khz; I don’t recall the exact number) are all fixed, there is only one possible resolution for SDTV.
[sup]1[/sup] Yes, I know it’s not exactly 60Hz, either, but the distinction is unimportant for this discussion.
There are, however, add-on toys to make use of additional lines. One is a “scan doubler”, which essentially shows the same image twice on the screen at once. I doesn’t “increase the resolution” but it DOES reduce the pixilation on large screens, and the image is significantly improved. We used one at the National Gallery of Art whenever we had to project SDTV in the main theatre.
Scissors. hdtv isn’t dvd, right? It would take a huge dvd to store a hdtv program.
I just saw a PHILIPS Plasma HDTV display-it was 60" and sells for $8,000.00! The picture quality (from a DVD) was superb-but I am concerned about the reliability-the warranty is only for 1 year/ Other posters have indicated that these plasma displays have a tendency to fade over time-is this true? And, what are the prospects for this receiver to get a little cheaper? I’d love to have one, but I can’t justify spending 8 grand on a TV set.
True; however, you’d need a display with at least double the bandwidth (i.e. 30Khz) to use a line doubler. The question was about incresed number of lines advertised with SDTVs. As noted above, HDTVs have built-in line doublers, but quality varies.
No, DVD is not HDTV or vice versa. Currently in development is the next generation of DVDs, which IIRC, will hold about 5 times what the current generation is capable of. Current DVD capacity is as follows:
[list=a]Single-sided, single layer with 4.7GB capacity
Double-sided, single layer with 8.5GB capacity
Single-sided, double layer with 9.4GB capacity
Double-sided, double layer with 17GB capacity[/list=a]A brief web search found a page that indicates that HDTV programming using MPEG-2 requires about 18Mbit/sec for the highest resolution; that comes out to 8.1GB/hour, so in theory you could fit a 2 hour movie on a double sided, double layer DVD if you skipped most of the extras. But since todays DVD players, even with progressive output, are not capable of outputting HDTV signals, don’t hold your breath. More likely is the development of a new standard combined with a new generation of players with HDTV output. And all this is assuming Hollywood finds an encryption algorithm they’re comfortable with.
Thanks, Scissors!
Mostly, I’m just bumping this because of all the good information.
It would seem that having a higher resolution SDTV won’t equate to a necessarily sharper picture with standard air / cable transmissions. But will it have any effect on VCR, DVD, or video game console images? Likewise, will it help prevent color-bleed or improve contrast to any real extent?
Thanks again,
David
Again, not necessarily. It’s really not any higher resolution, because while the hardware may technically be capable of displaying more lines, the NTSC standard (which your VCR, DVD player, video game, etc all comply with) has a limit of 480 or so lines. So, in a word, no.
I’m not an expert on color bleed, although having a good-quality 3D comb filter can help here, as can using S-Video or component inputs. And this may sound obvious, but you can improve contast by reducing the brightness and lowering the lights.
I should note that if you use S-Video or component, you are bypassing the set’s comb filter anyway.
SoulFrost wrote:
No no no, I think you misunderstand what is meant by “lines of horizontal resolution.”
The standard color TV broadcast format in the U.S. and Japan, called NTSC, does indeed have exactly 480 scan lines. But the number of scan lines indicates the vertical resolution of the display, i.e. how many pixels there are when measured from top-to-bottom. “Lines of horizontal resolution” is a term which specifies how many complete color pixels there are when measured from left-to-right.
This came as a bit of a shock to me when I discovered it, but the NTSC standard does not specify the horizontal resolution of a color TV signal. This is because it is an analog standard, rather than a digital standard. A given NTSC signal can have as few or as many lines of horizontal resolution as you can cram into the signal’s bandwidth. The NTSC signal on a broadcast TV station, for example, has to fit into 6 MHz, and typically carries a horizontal resolution of 330 lines. The NTSC signal recorded on a typical VHS tape (not S-VHS or D-VHS) is somewhat crappier, coming in at something like 200 lines of horizontal resolution. The S-VHS format was designed to be as good as, but not better than, the quality of broadcast TV, at 330 lines of horizontal resolution. Laserdiscs (remember those?), which also had an analog NTSC signal recorded on them, didn’t have to worry about fitting their signal in a 6 MHz band, and so typically had horizontal resolutions of 400 lines.
Note that all of these NTSC formats have the same vertical resolution of 480 scan lines.
Now, even though a laserdisc is recorded with a horizontal resolution of 400 lines, this doesn’t mean the TV set you use to display your laserdiscs will be able to display 400 separate, complete pixels across the screen. Black-and-white CRTs can display any horizontal resolution you like, because the phosphor on the back of the glass is just one big uniform surface – but color CRTs have to have teeny tiny little red, green, and blue phosphors located on the back of the glass everywhere a pixel can be. (Look really really closely at a color TV and you’ll see the picture is composed of tiny little red, green, and blue cells, typically arranged in a triangular pattern. The red cells glow red because that very spot on the back of the glass was painted with a red phosphor. The blue cell right next to the red one had to be painted with a blue phosphor.) The finer the grid of red, green, and blue phosphor cells on the back of the CRT’s glass, the more expensive it is to manufacture the TV.
This is why more expensive TV sets will often trumpet to the world how many lines of horizontal resolution they have.
Incidentally, unlike NTSC, the various U.S. HDTV standards are digital standards, and thus they do specify the horizontal resolution. The 1080i HDTV resolution that whack-a-mole was talking about specifies an exact resolution of 1920 pixels wide by 1080 pixels high. Furthermore, these pixels are all supposed to be perfectly square (i.e. each individual pixel has a 1-to-1 aspect ratio), so the aspect ratio of the picture as a whole is 1920 divided by 1080, or precisely 16-to-9.
W-a-M left off a category of video options I am quite keen on: Video glasses. I’ve tried these at trade shows and they are way cool. Needless to say their price is far lower than a 30+" LCD set but with the same resolution. The “feel” is like watching a decent quality big screen set, is very easy on my eyes, and I didn’t need my glasses! Of course, each viewer needs their own, etc. and you can’t “look away” to see what the cat got into. They are quite slim and lightweight (not at all like the virtual reality visors). I think they will become a significant part of the market. The issue isn’t the size of the screen, but size of the image on your retina.
Regarding the OP, note that glasses can be made to feed different images to each eye, i.e., 3-D video. This might be a “killer app” for these that can cause headaches in the HDTV world.
“Here to stay”? LPs were here to stay, cassettes were here to stay, VHS was here to stay, etc.
I have yet to see a pair of LCD glasses that have the same resolution as even a cheap TV. The ones I’ve seen range anywhere from 160 x 120 pixels, to 320 x 200. My HDTV-compatible projector, on the other hand, can do a true 1024 x 768, and even that isn’t ‘true’ HDTV.
When they release a set of glasses that can display DVD in full resolution at the proper aspect ratio, AND give me decent contrast so that the blacks look black and not like a medium grey, sign me up. Until then video glasses are not much more than a toy.
Whether you will need to buy a seperate set-top decoder box depends upon how you get your tv signal delivered. If you get your tv from one of the satellite services, you have to have a decoder box anyway, and you can get one with an hdtv decoder built in, though it costs more than the sd decoder.
I have cable tv. Cable tv comes in two basic flavors, standard, which requires only a cable ready tv which will decode the signal internally, and premium, which requires a cable box. My cable company provides an hd cable box at the same cost as the normal one. Right now, I get exactly four channels of hdtv (at 1080i), the HBO and Showtime hd west and east feeds, which are really just the same programs offset by three hours.
The picture on these four is incredible. Shrek looked better than it did in the theaters. Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within also looked incredible, as did Osmosis Jones. Live action movies (The Perfect Storm, A Knight’s Tale) also look fantastic if prepared for 16 x 9 broadcast, though anything shown in 4 x 3 loses the advantage of having a widescreen. The tv series (The Sopranos, Band of Brothers, Odyssey 5, Street Time, Sex and the City, Jeremiah, Six Feet Under, etc.) look better than anything available on broadcast channels, and tend to be better quality shows as well. Most movies include a DD 5.1 soundtrack, which can really enhance the experience if you have the system to play it. HBO has the bad habit of cropping 2.35:1 movies to 16:9; Showtime shows the anamorphic widescreen movies with black bars.
Is this a good enough reason to buy a 16 x 9 hdtv set? Nah. But if you like to watch a lot of dvd’s, and have the disposable income to get one, it’s a good way to go. A decent 16 x 9 hdtv set paired with a progressive scan dvd player playing anamorphic dvd’s can give you a picture that falls only a little short of those 1080i broadcasts. I’ve seen The Hustler on the big screen at a revival/art house theater and it didn’t look nearly as good as the recently released dvd. 4 x 3 aspect ratio movies also look fantastic, as they benefit greatly from the progressive scanning. Non-anamorphic dvd’s tend to not benefit as much, as a third of the vertical resolution is lost even when displayed on a 16 x 9 set, and widescreen movies either cropped or open matted to 4 x 3 tend to lose the benefit. The good news is that most new releases are anamorphic, and older discs that weren’t are being upgraded. My wife gets irritated with me all the time when I upgrade my old non-anamorphic movies for newer enhanced versions (The Princess Bride, Carrie, soon *Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs), but she also thinks one time is enough to see a movie, so I disregard such objections.
I set about 8 feet from a 56" 16 x 9 hdtv, and I can see no scan lines in either dvd’s or true hdtv; on my old 36" JVC, I could see them at that distance.
Recommendations:
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Get a decent progressive scan dvd player (Panasonic and JVC make good, reasonably priced ones), and make sure the tv will pass the picture through in it’s native mode (480p), and not upconvert it to 540 or 1080. You lose the advantage of the progressive signal with upconversion.
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Get a copy of Video Essentials, or one of several similar products, and use it to calibrate the settings on the tv.
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The factory settings for the set will be “torch mode”, meaning that the white level (often labeled contrast or picture) will be set way too high to make the picture look good on well lit showroom floors. Turn it down to no higher than 1/2 to 1/3 of the max immidiately or you risk the new set wearing out much too quickly and you risk burn in.
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When watching regular 4 x 3 shows, watching in 4 x 3 mode risks burn in by those grey bars at the sides. The set will probably come with a variety of stretch and zoom modes. I watch 4 x 3 shows in a mode called “just”, which stretches progressively (very little in the center, more towards the edges); different manufacturers use different names but they all have a similar one. After a couple of days, I no longer noticed the stretching at all unless there was a scrolling text bar.
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If there are funds available, after a sufficient burn-in time (about 100 hours of on and off watching) find a calibration specialist and have him adjust your set. Depending upon what you have him do, it can cost a couple hundred dollars for a basic callibration to around a thousand. I paid $600 plus travel fees to have my set adjusted, and it was worth every penny. If you aren’t an enthusiast, this probably wouldn’t be a good expenditure.
My system:
TV: Panasonic RP56WX51 56" 16 x 9 rear projection HDTV
DVD: JVC 500SL
Reciever: Pioneer VSX 711
Speakers: Polk 730
I echo the kudos to Whack-a-mole for the comprehensive post.
About a year ago I took the plunge. I bought a CRT HDTV, 16:9 aspect ratio (38" diagonal, which is plenty big enough for viewing distance) and a progressive scan DVD player.
Needless to say, the picture quality while viewing a DVD is exceptional. My son hooked up his X-Box to the TV which also results in an incredible picture.
I view all regular broadcasts in horizontal stretch mode to avoid the gray bands to the right and left of the 4:3 broadcast. (If the broadcast is widescreen, then I’ll view it stretched both horizontally and vertically.) The brain adjusts (there must be some internal brain-wiring that eventually converts the retinal image to a shape that makes more sense… sort of like those old experiments where people wore glasses that inverted the image, and after a period of time the people said they began to see the world right side up again.) I don’t even notice the distortion anymore. On the contrary, just for the heck of it I will occasionally turn off the stretch mode and go to the 4:3 ratio, and when I do that all the actors seem abnormally thin until my brain readjusts.
On some broadcasts, because of the stretching, there is a pixelated appearance. This is especially true of sports broadcasts. I have no idea why that would be true.
On some shows that are broadcast in HDTV (like CSI for example) I can stretch both directions and the picture quality is still nearly as good as a DVD.
Bottom line. I love my wide-screen HDTV.
This looks like nearly pure marketing at the present time. The horizontal resolution depends on the properties of the CRT screen and the size of the spot that the electron beam makes on it. It the spot is of such a size that 805 of them will fit across the screen and be distinguishable as individual spots just touching each other, then you have 805 line horizontal resolution. Whether or not the set can make use of this better resolution depends upon the bandwidth of its picture channel.
The vertical resolution, on the other hand, is determined by the number of lines drawn across the face of the tube as the spot moves from top to bottom. The US standard is 525 lines total and this is the most vertical resolution any set can have irrespective of its quality. Some of the lines used up in retrace, i.e. getting the spot back to the top rapidy after it reaches the bottom, and some are not on the screen because of overscan. That is, the raster of horizontal lines is slightly larger than the screen so you end up with somewhere around 500 lines actually visible on screen.
I second this advice. However, the standard Video Essentials is geared for standard definition televisions. There is a new Digital Video Essentials coming out that will be geared to help those with Progressive Scan DVDs and HDTVs. Unfortunately it isn’t due out till the end of this year (I can’t wait).
In the meantime some DVD movies come with a configuration feature to help you adjust your set. I know my copy of Akira has it and I believe Star Wars: The Phantom Menace has it as well. You usually see it as a THX setup routine in the options section of the DVD. I highly recommend to anyone to run this if you never have before (regardless of what type of TV you have). You need special blue glasses (which I’ve never seen) for one part of the setup but the rest works just fine and is still worthwhile to do. Ideally have someone else in the room with you so you can get a second opinion and discuss the ideal settings being looked for. The whole process may take you about 10-15 minutes to do if you do it carefully. There is also an audio setup in there if you have a stereo or surround sound system hooked up.
Still, if you have a really good setup and want it to perform its best then go for the Video Essentials CD or drop the big bucks for a professional adjustment to be made.
Mitsubishi sure claims to have an HDTV VCR: http://www.mitsubishi-tv.com/2000U.html
As does JVC: http://www.jvc.com/product.jsp?productId=PRD4603000