Comments on: Don’t be too quick to trash high definition DVD

By: Alec

Alec — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:35:29 +0000

Granted. You can definitely see the difference on my TV, but it’s a 62 inch set. Also, there are an awful lot of 40 inch sets being sold today as “high definition” with much lower pixel counts than the HD spec would demand. For example, a common practice is to reduce the number of horizontal pixels. True HD is 1080×1920, but I saw a lot of sets out there last Christmas with on 1024 pixels horizontally. The image suffers when you get past 40″.

For most people, however, it’s not until they see SD and HD side by side that they appreciate the difference. For example, my wife (who regularly watches SD content on that big set!) commented on how awful the commercials looked during the hockey game last night — SD content inserted into the middle of an HD stream.

By: Billy

Billy — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 06:21:49 +0000

> many people with 1080 line TVs are not able to see all those pixels

that’s the point, brad.

By: Brad Templeton

Brad Templeton — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:23:07 +0000

Well, strictly speaking, HDTV has about 6x the pixels of DVD, though since until recently most people have had 720 line HDTVs it has only been 3x.

And there’s a reasonable argument that 3x pixels is really only a 1.7x improvement in resolution, and 6x only a 2.4x improvement. So nowhere near the 10x you are looking for.

In addition, due to the resolution limits of the human eye, many people with 1080 line TVs are not able to see all those pixels, and their improvement is somewhat less.

However, the difference over broadcast TV and especially VHS was much greater. That’s closer to 10x.

However, many people do find this to be a order of magnitude anyway. It’s of the level that “once you have HD, you hate going back to SD” which is enough.

It will get better when few people have SD, because then TV will get composed for HD (less need for close-ups that lose the context) and that will make a qualitative improvement.

By: Did Toshiba Drop HD-DVD Too Early? « Clearing My Head

Did Toshiba Drop HD-DVD Too Early? « Clearing My Head — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:49:03 +0000

[...] Did Toshiba Drop HD-DVD Too Early? Alec Saunders (a fellow Canuck) has an interesting observation about Toshiba and HD-DVD. [...]

By: Michael Graves

Michael Graves — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:43:35 +0000

Toshiba’s comment doesn’t take into consideration Blu-Ray. Not making that statement is political face-saving on their part. As you argue they need to move the entire value chain, but were unable to sustain the support of a significant mass of content creators…the studios.

To those of us with HD-DVD players (mine is an HD-XA1) we could see that this battle was over by mid-2007 when HD-DVD releases slowed to a trickle. No new content..no reason to buy the players. At the very same time Blue-Ray releases stared to come in good numbers and from a variety of sources.

Now the really good question to ask revolves around did Sony & IBM really make a deal with Toshiba involving dropping HD-DVD in return for additional rights to the cell processor or and related manufacturing in the far east?

BTW, I work for a broadcast hardware manufacturer. We started delivering HD gear in late 1999. There was essentially nothing to watch in most markets until much more recently.

By: Mitch Brisebois

Mitch Brisebois — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:36:58 +0000

Too early? I remember seeing my first HDTV in the early 90s in a Bell South demo lab in Atlanta. I thought it was pretty cool, but most people couldn’t tell the difference with regular TV. I don’t think much has changed. People aren’t going to switch on “quality” alone. The move to DVD from VHS wasn’t just about a better experience, but the convenience (and no rewinding). With MP3s, people are ok with crappy sound for the convenience and portability of the format.

Strange, but true: quality is under-appreciated!