With the World Soccer Championship coming up this June, a lot of people are buying have found an alibi to buy a spanking brand new TV. And of course this means people are going from the old fashioned analog CRT TV to that new flatpanel digital LCD or Plasma TV. But finding and buying a good TV is not so easy. There is a lot of technical mumbo jumbo involved and it seems everyone is trying to dazzle and confuse us with tech terms. It starts of course with the question, which is better: Plasma or LCD? Another question is: is my TV really “HDTV” or “HDTV-ready”. Most people think they have a vague idea what it is, but even for someone who is pretty tech-savvy like myself, it is not easy to understand everything. So what is HDTV anyway? And why should I buy a HDTV ready TV? And does it really mean I am set for the future? Well, there is no simple answer to that it seems. But one interesting thing is that obviously from a technical viewpoint some of the HDTV hoopla is just pure nonsens. According to the standards HDTV is defined as 1080 active lines, 16 x 9 aspect ratio in ITU-R BT.709 (everyone knows that, right?) This, and the fact that HDTV is broadcasted digitally, should give us an uprecedented good, sharp and clear image. Wether we’re watching TV or movies. Right?
Well, according to the experts, 1080 doesn’t really mean 1080. Apparantly we are being duped to believe that TV’s are doing the ‘real’ 1080p while in reality they are doing 1080i. Notice the teeny tiny difference? Yeah, its the p versus the i. Or, in technical terms: progressive scan versus interlaced. Because there currently is no equipment at all that really supports 1080p. In reality most TV’s just fake it.
HDTVexpert, an excellent website for consumers on HDTV has an excellent article about this whole deal. If you want to find out more about HDTV and what’s real and not real, I recommend you to read this. Here is a small summary:
To summarize: There are no fast refresh (30Hz or 60Hz) 1080p production or transmission formats in use, nor are there any looming in the near future — even on the new HD-DVD and Blu-ray formats. The bandwidth is barely there for 1080i channels, and it’s probably just as well, because most TVs wouldn’t support 1080p/60 anyway — they’d just convert those signals to 1080i or 540p before you saw them.
The 1280×720 progressive-scan HDTV format, which can be captured at full resolution using existing broadcast cameras and survives MPEG-2 compression better than 1080i, doesn’t make it to most HDTV screens without first being altered to 1080i or 540p in a set-top box or in the HDTV set itself. So what chance would a 1080p signal have?
Great. Not only am I forced to make a choice between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, but also I will have to consider what kind of TV I will have to choose. I must say I wish were were back to the old days where the only choice was wether you could afford a color TV or had to buy B/W.
Ps: also read the FAQ as a result of the article on 1080p at HDTVexpert. It’s also enlightening.