T3D Re: 3D HDTV

[roberts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (John W Roberts)]

>Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1999 18:37:53 -0700
>From: Bob Wier <wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: T3D Re: 3D HDTV

>This got me to thinking - the Philips ad for the flat screen
>TV appears as if it might be a 16:9 format (hard to tell). 
>Since the last I heard these were in the range of $15,000
>(3 college kids with one - yeah, right) does anybody have
>a clue as to why they are running national level ads? Seems
>expensive to advertise a product that's still mostly vaporware
>unless they expect some kind of technology breakthru that will
>dramatically reduce the price...

There's at least one video store in suburban Maryland (possibly three
or more by now), where you can walk in and buy a 1080-line HDTV
system for *much* less than $15K (seems to me it was about $6K, but I
don't remember for sure). Prices are expected to get considerably lower
than that over a number of years.

I've seen demos at several stores, and the first official 1080-line
HDTV broadcast from local station WETA. It definitely provides vastly
more detail than conventional broadcast - for me, the effect was as though
I had been wearing a very murky pair of sunglasses to watch TV all these
years, and suddenly took them off. (Maybe prescription glasses wearers
could come up with a more dramatic analogy.)

Naturally, the demonstrations tend to concentrate on things which greatly
benefit from sharper detail - shots from within Washington Cathedral
(stained glass, etc.), football games, nature scenes, and so on. Soap
operas might not have quite so immediate a benefit from HDTV resolution.

Note that 16:9 and HDTV are not synonymous - we have a 16:9 plasma
display that's 854x480. It looks very good, but it's not HDTV resolution.
(You can, however, get a converter that will convert HDTV signals down
into lower video resolutions - even though the result is not HDTV, it
can look very good.) HDTV also doesn't have to be plasma - there are
HDTV projection systems, and (I think) available direct view CRT systems.

[My opinions.]
John R


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