Priority Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia What You Don't See Counts

People who consciously choose to be involved in the early stages of a revolution often face the consequences. No, I’m not talking about marching up to the guillotine while Marie-somebody is yelling about eating cake. I’m talking about our technical revolution and just what has happened in the past 25 years.

I tend to be Mr. Gambler when it comes to new technical stuff. I had one of the very first cell phones sold in Connecticut. It was back in ’81 or so and it sounded like a great idea. I guess I just loved the old movies where the good guys had car phones. I had looked at getting one of those before the age of cell phones, but there were problems. Like Taxi Cab medallions, there were a limited number of phone frequencies and they were all taken. Someone had to either move out of state or die for you to get a license. The concrete on the first cell tower wasn’t even dry when I ordered a phone.

The bad news was that my original cell phone weighed about 10 pounds and took a whole briefcase to carry it. I can remember that for about three years there wasn’t even any coverage within 25 miles. If you lived in Fairfield County near New York there was coverage, but northeastern Connecticut was a communications wasteland. I could bore you to death with descriptions of other early experiences with videocassette recorders, stereo systems, digital cameras, digital audio recorders, and DVD players.

Today’s challenge is HDTV. I bought my first high-definition TV, a 55² Samsung rear-projection set, three years ago. Although there were no high-definition signals available to use it with, I justified the purchase with the thought that it could take the XVGA output from my laptop (for presentations or slide shows) and display progressive-scan DVDs. Of course, it was another year before somebody made a progressive-scan DVD, and laptops in the bedroom are about as useful as a car jack.

About a year ago it looked like the industry was finally getting its act together. HDNET started broadcasting a real 1080i signal via DirecTV, and some local stations were supposedly broadcasting high-definition signals in primetime. I decided to get a second-generation HDTV with the hope that the industry finally figured it all out. This time it is was a 65² Mitsubishi Diamond rear-projection set. Of course, if you actually want high definition, you have to throw in another grand for an HDTV tuner.

My reason for describing all of this is not because I’m starting a chapter of high-tech buyers-anonymous. It’s to warn you about the things they don’t tell you when it comes to HDTV.

There is a tremendous difference between my first- and second-generation sets. I’m not familiar with everything being sold on the market today, but some manufacturers may still be offering what I call first generation as their introductory or lower-cost products. These are TVs that, although 1080i-compatible, don’t offer the second-generation bells and whistles to keep from self-destructing. Let me explain.

HDTVs have screens with 16:9 aspect ratios. This is wonderful except that for the last three years, and still mostly today, there is little 16:9 programming. These sets are designed to show regular 4:3 aspect ratio NTSC programming by centering the image on the screen and having the rest of the screen blanked (usually with black vertical bars). The good news is that you can see regular TV. The bad news is that after a year or two of showing 4:3 content on a 16:9 screen, the first time you use 16:9 content you notice you have two bright vertical bars burned onto your screen. You’d think that the idiots who designed these things must use screen savers on their PCs, so they wouldn’t be quite this clueless when designing TVs.

First-generation sets have limited capability to protect against this. They might provide digital picture stretching or something similar, but their conversion utilities between 4:3 and 16:9 don’t offer enough versatility to actually use, so you always show 4:3 as 4:3. For the most part, the second-generation sets have significantly more digital processing capabilities that help you avoid burn-in. Selecting among Expand, Zoom, Stretch, or Narrow functions, you can typically fill the 16:9 screen with something that doesn’t look too irritating.

Many people think that dropping $5K to $10K on a plasma HDTV solves everything. A plasma-screen TV does offer a less-cumbersome set with razor-sharp picture; however, you have to weigh its considerable advantages over its disadvantage, namely burn-in. Like CRTs, plasma has the same propensity to change brightness with age. I’m told that burn-in can actually be worse than CRTs. The only technologies that are not susceptible to burn-in are LCDs and digital light processing (DLP). Very little signal manipulation is applied when displaying a 1080i image, so both first- and second-generation HDTVs show high-definition pictures with exceptional quality. When you look at the high-definition picture on either one in the showroom, it’s hard to understand why there can be thousands of dollars difference between the sets.

Unfortunately, present-day HDTV-broadcast content probably isn’t much more than 5%. That means that 95% of the time you have to be careful how you use your set if you don’t have an immune display technology or digital processing that evenly ages the display screen. The lesson is not to look at the great high-definition pictures in the store. They all look great. Put on a 4:3 NTSC station and ask the salesman how he deals with what you don’t see.

steve.ciarcia@circuitcellar.com

Published: April 2003