Mark Gilbert’s Blog

So I’m told this year will see a lot of people buying new TV sets to watch England get thrashed by countries which have never even had a small empire, let alone the biggest one the world had ever seen. Oh how the mighty have fallen. Anyway, enough colonialism. A lot of TV’s will be sold, but do people really know what they should be looking at when they buy them? I’d like to bet no, and over the next few paragraphs I’ll tell you why.

Background

The change from analogue to digital begins in 2008 when the Border region has its analogue signal switched off. The process then continues through other regions and finishes in 2012 when London, Meridian and Ulster get analogue switched off. The industry is using the switch to digital to get consumers to buy new ‘HD Ready’ TVs, but the honest truth is you can watch digital TV on an analogue CRT if you so choose. Sky has been a digital signal for some time now, and people manage just fine on their old sets, so why would people be convinced to spend possibly over £1000 on a new ‘HD Ready’ TV when their old one will suffice?
It’s easy to get confused by this FUD, as the majority of the buying public associates digital TV with a flat LCD or plasma panel. The situation isn’t helped by the World Cup. The 1966 tournament was the first to be broadcast in colour and now the 2006 event is the first to go out in HD, so there’s a major push to convince footie fans to buy HD TVs.

Well Joe Public being as generally ignorant as he is the majority of the buying public associates digital TV with a flat LCD or plasma system. This is then being compounded by the World Cup this year being broadcast in HD for the first time, and apparently a lot of people want to watch in intricate detail of HD as other players dance round England’s men, with as much effort as it takes them to put on their socks in the morning.

So all the major shops are stocking HD TVs in readyness for people buying them. Chances are though they are not demoing HD content for the most part, but simply standard definition (SD) content since very few people currently transmit HD content. The best you will probably get is a standard DVD or if you’re lucky a true HD demo provided by the beeb which is streamed from a hard drive.

TV’s

The TVs people are looking at will most likely be plasma or LCD panel, DLP TVs are for the most part too big for most homes, even if they are reasonably cheap for their size. The Samsung SP50L6HDX sells for roughly £1,349 which is fairly cheap for a 50″ screen. DLP screens do come with other drawbacks too though. The picture isn’t as warm as a plasma, and the colours can be harsh. While HD CRT’s do exist they tend to be huge, obviously the bigger the screen size the greater the depth of the set will be. Samsung are working on a slimline one which will be available soon, but most people will still opt for LCD or plasma.
In terms of which is better display type, LCD or plasma, it’s very hard to seperate them. Just ensure you have a good look at them before plumping for one or the other.

Aspect Ratios And Resolution

Most modern TVs can handle changes in aspect ratio fairly easily. I’ve had a Sony screen for a while and that ahs no trouble changing ratios for films or other ratios. This is good since some content such as the news is still put out in the old 4:3 ratio while movies and most modern TV shows are transmitted in a widescreen, 16:9 format. There is no reason though why this could not change in the future though, those few programs still broadcast in 4:3 could be sent out in 16:9 before the digital switch over. There is no technical reason not to do this.

As well as changing aspect ratios your new TV will also have to be able to change resolution, a problem not currently present. The majority of HD content will be broadcast in the 720p format, this is likely what you will see coming out of the beeb when they start broadcasting fully in HD, which wont happen until after the digital switchover due to bandwidth constraints.

Sky’s current plans are to broadcast in 1080i which means that content being imported from the US will have to be upscaled from 720p to 1080i. The same goes for shows on chanels such as UK Gold, which shows a lot of old BBC and ITV content, these too would have to be upscaled. It would make more sense for Sky to stay in line with the other broadcasters, but I guess they are trying to set themselves apart from the pack. transmitting in 1080i may give them opportunity to get some exclusive content which doesn’t have to be upscaled, which would validate their idea, otherwise it makes little sense to go with 1080i over 720p.

SD content can be viewed on a HD TV and providing you have a good quality set, the quality is just as good as a normal SD TV. You can buy upscalers though, which will take an SD signal and upscale it right up to 1080i if you so choose, but picture sharpness and definition can be dodgy. It’s like the digital zoom on a camera, the missing pixels have to be guessed at to fill in the blanks which can lead to loss of clarity.

Size

Anyone who tells you size doesn’t matter is either sorted in that department or seriously lacking, I’ll leave it up to you to make the call as to which. As a rule of thumb on screen size though, if your chosen screen is 40″ or above then make sure it will support 1080i. 1080i is the resolution which the next gen optical discs, Blu-ray and HD-DVD, will support. 1080p is the ultimate in image quality, however it also comes with an ultimate price tag and the sets are hard to find. Plus only Blu-ray will support 1080p, HD-DVD will only support 1080i, so finding a source to give 1080p resolution could be tricky unless Blu-ray wins the next gen disc wars. It should again be noted however that 720p will be the main broadcast format, and so having a 1080i or 1080p capable set will provide little real world benefit.

Connecting It All

Next comes the complicated part, connecting the whole lot together. Your existing DVD player can be hooked up using a regular SCART connector, as can you PS2. If you have an Xbox 360 it can output HD through it’s component interface. The component interface will also be useful for connecting other devices too, so as long as the content isn’t copy protected. However the sad truth is that soon most HD content is expected to be copy protected with the industry standard AACS protection system. It is at this point that you have to consider HDMI inputs. HDMI is capable of delivering both video and audio down a single cable, which is a much neater solution than component inputs, and more akin to SCART.

HD films will not be let out without a solid anti-piracy system, the MPAA will make sure of that. So all the HD films will be heavily locked down through all parts of the system. As the encrypted HD signal passes through all the devices, each one checks to ensure that the next device in the link supports AACS and has an HDCP chip which will securely hold the encryption keys for the content. Every part ofn the chain has to support AACS and HDCP, even the cable used to connect the devices, so that rules out SCART connectors or components for you Blu-ray or HD-DVD player. Even you set top box which you are using to recieve you HD signals will have to be connected via a HDMI cable to keep the copy protection going.

So what if the copy protection chain is broken I hear you cry. Well the copy protection system is supposed to end with your HDCP enabled HD TV where you actually view the image and listen to the sound. However if you connect a PVR such or a camcorder so you can record shows to hard disk or digital tape then the chain is broken. Now the big implication of this is that the system responds by dropping the resolution of the image. Bad news. So your lovely 1080i HD signal drops from 1,920 x 1,080 to 960 x 540, and a 720p image will drop even lower, probably to 480p which is worse than the current PAL system in use in the UK and more in line with the crappy NTSC system used in the US.
The same signal resolution changes will also happen if you don’t connect your HDCP enabled TV and HDCP enabled HD source with HDMI connection, so really for this, component video simply will not cut it. I also know for a fact that some manufacturers are selling ‘HD Ready’ TV’s without HDMI inputs, and this is a very bad thing. People will buy a new ‘HD Ready’ TV only to discover that they have to suffer a worse resolution than the old SD content provided, simply because the manufacturer omitted a HDMI connector and so broke the HDCP chain for the unwitting consumer. This consumer will be whats commonly known as gutted.

Conclusion

So is the time right to buy? The answer is probably not. Prices are still relatively high and there is still a lack of content. The World Cup will be in HD, but then the beeb will resume normal SD broadcasts.
Sky is still an unproven option, it costs £299 for the HD box, and then £10 per month on top of your existing subscription package. Plus Sky have trouble broadcasting through heavy cloud cover even now, with the extra bandwidth that HD will consume it remains to be seen if tehy can cope with the extra data. Plus Sky cannot deliver the HD boxes in enough number to satisfy demand. Personally I would wait until more content is available in HD, by which time prices of the TVs will have fallen and 1080p sets may be more affordable.

Cheers

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 11:15 and is filed under Hardware, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.