Avi Greengart – Page 20

Upsampling is the new progressive scan

January 20, 2005 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

I don’t know why this didn’t come out at CES, but Samsung is expanding their lineup of upsampling DVD players. The key product feature is added 768p support, which is the native resolution for many plasma and projectors (the players will also do 480i for regular TVs, 480p for digital EDTVs, and 720p and 1080i for other HDTVs).

This is great news if you have a recent model 768p TV with DVI or HDMI, but this is NOT HD. It’s merely moving the process of image manipulation from your TV over to your DVD player. Your HD TV has more lines of resolution than are on a DVD, so the image must be upconverted somewhere; doing it in the player itself can offer a slightly better picture by keeping the signal digital throughout its journey from disc to screen. Of course, that’s only if you

have a digital TV
with digital video inputs (DVI or HDMI)
use those inputs, and
set everything up correctly.

I highly doubt most consumers will understand the nuances or set things up to properly take advantage of them. I remember how many questions I got when progressive scan DVD players came out (progressive scan DVD players make NO difference on analog TVs and often make no difference even on digital TVs that have good internal image processing). Lately it seems that any time you put the word high definition in the product description, consumer confusion ensues.

But can you blame the CE industry for trying? Margins on regular DVD players (even ones with progressive scan) are in the toilet. My supermarket sells $29.99 DVD players. So does the local gas station. Banks give them away instead of toasters when you open a checking account. Adding progressive scan didn’t help things for manufacturers, as that simply became another feature on even the cheapest DVD players. Consumers rejected Nuon and similar "DVD and" schemes, and consumers are ignoring DVD-Audio and SACD without even discovering that they exist. Video killed the audio star (receiver and component sales have been dropping for years), and DVD has been a gravy train for Hollywood but not Japan. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are the CE industry’s last hope for reclaiming profits out of media players, which is why we’re getting a HD disc format war nobody wants. In the meantime, the hope is that upsampling players will convince consumers to buy another deck (and spend actual money on it this time).

-avi

Displays

Plasma vs. LCD

January 19, 2005 - by Avi Greengart - 3 Comments.

Now that CES is over, it’s time to hit the mailbag. If my email inbox is a barometer of market readiness, there’s a lot of consumer confusion around LCD and plasma. Here’s a primer:

Both LCD and plasma have advantages and disadvantages. The simple answer is that – due to manufacturing constraints – for smaller sized screens you’re limited to LCD and for larger screens you’ll only find plasma. If you’re in the middle, then keep these guidelines in mind:

LCD

LCD is currently a lot more expensive on a per inch basis. This doesn’t mean it’s better, just that it’s more expensive to manufacture.
There are LCDs with 1920x1080p resolution on the market. Plasmas currently top out at lower (but still HDTV) resolutions. It won’t stay that way for long – Samsung and LG have shown 1080p plasmas – and on real world material, the added resolution doesn’t always make much of a difference. But if you want a 1080p flat panel display, LCD is it for now.
Both LCD and plasma displays are blazingly bright. But LCD is typically even brighter than plasma and thus is better in a bright, sunlit environment than plasma.
LCD isn’t as subject to burn-in as plasma, so it’s better for watching CNBC, playing video games, or watching a lot of 4:3 (square) programming on a 16:9 (wide) screen.
LCDs can be used in high altitudes where many plasmas have problems. If you live in Denver or the Himalayas, don’t buy a plasma over the Internet – make sure you see and hear it locally – plasmas whine at high altitude.
LCDs are less expensive to operate as they use less electricity.

Plasma

Today’s plasmas are better than LCD in contrast and black level performance. However, in this respect, both plasma and LCD pale in comparison (literally) to CRT TVs and the newest DLP rear projection units.
Today’s plasmas are slightly better than LCD in color fidelity.
Due to their lower native resolution, the cheaper EDTV plasmas often do a better job displaying regular NTSC cable or satellite TV than HDTV plasmas or LCD.
Plasmas do not need to be "recharged." New plasmas should last at least as long as your traditional CRT TV, though they may lose some brightness well down the road.

-avi

CES 2005: Trends

January 12, 2005 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

I spent most of my time at CES focused on mobile devices, but did note a few overriding trends:

The story of the show was definitely flat panels, which were everywhere. LG showed off a particularly interesting integrated plasma/HDTV tuner/DVR, and Samsung showed off a plasma so big you couldn’t get it down the stairs and into my basement even if you took out a second mortgage to pay for it. On the opposite end of the pricing spectrum, there were countless Asian importers with booths at the show displaying large LCD and plasmas at much lower prices.
The other big deal at the show was that the focus of the computer industry is solidly on the living room – Microsoft, Intel, and HP all had huge booths dedicated to moving audio and video around the home. The problem with Media Centers for me has always been cost and form factor. HP’s new HD Media Center looks especially sweet because once you’re talking about HDTV the price jumps dramatically (the only standalone HD-DVR on the market costs $1,000), and the new horizontal cases look like they belong in your A/V rack, not your desk.
Conversely, there were barely any new portable media players introduced other than the Olympus m:robe (a strong iPod mini competitor which I have in for review, and which looks gorgeous). I take this as an indication that other than the video players (which have problems getting content unless you have a Media Center PC), Apple has this market completely locked up. Now that the iPod shuffle appears to be the Next Big Thing, watch for copycat products (not that copycats will succeed – when pricing is down to $99 to start with, how do you compete with cachet?).
In projectors, CEDIA was the land of $2,500 – $3,000 720p LCD boxes with automatic iris adjustment and great contrast from Panasonic and Sony. CES was the TI DLP team’s chance to strike back: BenQ showed me a great 720p DLP HD2+ projector for around $3,000 (the 7700). Several products debuted with TI’s new DarkChip such as BenQ’s 8720; pricing on those is above $10,000, but the HD2+ products were nearly as good. This looks like it will work out so that custom installers will recommend the higher end products while enthusiasts buying/installing on their own will gravitate towards the $3,000 products. …but we’re not done. A slew of sub-$2,000 DLP projectors with 480p or 576p resolution were also introduced. I didn’t see any of them at the show, but Evan Powell over at ProjectorCentral has a good recap.

My final trend is a question: could CES be getting too big to be relevant? It’s always been hard to get around the show, and the weather didn’t help (when it snows in Vegas it’s fair to say hell has frozen over). Next year CES kicks the Adult Video show out of the Sands and takes over that venue, too. But at the same time, CEDIA has been getting a lot of the big home theater announcements, the wireless device vendors are saving their news for CTIA, and the mobile media player market is all focused on MacWorld.

-avi

Accessories

CES 2005: Logitech Sweetens the Harmony

January 9, 2005 - by Avi Greengart - 1 Comment

Logitech has done really well with their acquisition of Intrigue Technologies, makers of the Harmony remote control line. With the broadened marketing and distribution muscle behind it, Logitech announced that they have overtaken Philips and Sony as market share leaders for programmable remote controls. This doesn’t surprise me, as most remote controls have a serious drawback – you have to program them. The Harmony essentially programs itself once you walk through a questionnaire online. While it took them a year or so before they had enough codes online to work consistently, I now consider the Harmony the reviewer’s best friend: add a new piece of gear in the rack; add a new piece of gear online to the remote. Done. And, because it’s task-oriented (“watch TV,” “watch DVD”), it’s spouse and babysitter friendly.

I’d heard rumors that a color Harmony was on the way, but they didn’t make much sense – the Harmony just uses its small monochrome LCD for simple status and help messages. Logitech unveiled the Harmony 880 at CES in Las Vegas this past week, and it has a color screen along with a strong rationale for the addition. The new screen is about twice the size of the traditional screen, is not terribly high resolution and is not a touch screen. The notion is that a larger color screen allows the Harmony to display more information and provide after-macro customization options (buttons flank the screen on both sides). Task-oriented remotes are great, but they can’t always deal with complex options. For example, if you have a widescreen TV, once you’ve “watched a DVD,” you may need to adjust the aspect ratio. Or not – depending on the movie. In my home theater, we added a “slowly dim the lights” command every time you pressed “play.” Unfortunately, that meant that any time you paused the movie, it was pitch black in the room, and the lighting controls were buried in a separate menu. With the new 880, you’ll be able to place those commands on the color screen after the main activity has launched. Colorful TV station logos for a favorites menu (part of the canned demo on the prototype units shown at the show) are merely a bonus.

The price point on the unit will be an astonishingly low $249, which is less than the original monochrome unit retailed for when it launched three years ago.

-avi

Accessories / Industry / PC Convergence

CES 2005: New Remote for Custom Installers

January 9, 2005 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

UEI launched the Nevo SL "Pronto killer" touch screen remote control here last night in Las Vegas, and it’s got two really interesting features: a better programming interface than Philips offers for the Pronto (not that that’s saying much – the Pronto programming environment is terrible), and built in WiFi. WiFi could be used for just about anything – the remote is based on a version of Windows Mobile – but at least initially the idea is to stream media from one PC to another. Now, that may seem a bit ahead of its time, but according to Current Analysis*, 11% of all consumer PCs sold this holiday season were XP Media Centers, so there’s beginning to be an installed base for this sort of thing. Store your digital photos on the PC in the bedroom, stream them over to the Media Center in the den – all using the same remote. An adapter will be available to use WiFi to act as an IR blaster; not quite as good as full RF support (coming later in the product life cylce, I’m told) but it should allow installers to hide gear in a cabinet or closet and control it via the Nevo SL.

The Nevo SL isn’t as comprehensive as offerings from Crestron, nor does it offer state-sensing add-ons (also coming later in the product life cycle). At $799, it’s also nowhere near as expensive as those offerings, and competes directly against the Philips Pronto. UEI’s extensive code database is included, but unlike recent versions of the Pronto, no provision for automatic configuration is included. This would be a deadly omission if the product was aimed at consumers, but UEI assures me that the product will be sold through the CEDIA custom install channel. That makes sense, but someone should tell their marketing department: none of their literature, press releases, signage, or press kits breathes a word about custom installers or how this product can benefit them. This isn’t just a failure to communicate benefits, it actively works against UEI: if I were a custom installer, I’d be afraid that consumers – enthusiasts, mostly – would think that they could buy this remote themselves, leading to channel conflict. As Home Theater View has advocated in the past, channels need to be considered for their individual needs.

-avi

*Note: Avi Greengart is a Principal Analyst for Current Analysis

Industry / PC Convergence

CES 2005: You want convergence?

January 4, 2005 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

SBC preannounced their big CES news: a set top box that combines satellite TV programming, digital video recording, video on demand, and Internet content. There have been everything-but-the-kitchen-sink set top boxes before (anybody remember last CES? the year before that?), but I believe that this is significant for one reason: distribution. Most of the converged set top box dreams of years past are all about consumer technology value propositions: distributing content around the house, moving photos and music off the PC, and providing Internet access from the TV. That’s nice, but other than increased tech support calls, there’s little incentive for content owners to sell it.

But this is different. From what I can tell, the consumer value proposition for the SBC/Yahoo!/Dish/(did I leave someone out?) gizmo is simply saving money and consolidating billing relationships; any technical goodies are gravy. The convergence factor is just a means to an end: this is all about services bundling, which should reduce churn and protect these customers from being snatched away piecemeal by cable or satellite or Verizon.

-avi

Games

Happy New Year

December 31, 2004 - by Avi Greengart - 1 Comment

Everyone else is doing retrospectives at the end of the year…

Ten years ago, I was single, living in an apartment, and my home theater consisted of a 27" CRT TV, Dolby Pro Logic receiver, HiFi VHS VCR, and a cobbled-together surround speaker system from Acoustic Research, Yamaha, and an AudioSource subwoofer. Despite non-discrete surround sound and letterboxed VHS — probably the lowest resolution format for movies of all time — it rocked! Other than the lack of a laserdisc player, it was reasonably cutting edge. DVD, digital front projectors, HDTV, home THX, Dolby Digital EX, automatic room callibration, DLP and LCOS… none of that existed ten years ago.

Still, I suspect if you played a video on that system with a bunch of today’s kids they’d eat popcorn and enjoy the flick. Apparently, the same can’t be said for video games (despite nostalgia and my long-held assumption that game play was better back when designers couldn’t rely on graphics to carry the game). Electronic Games Monthly did their own retrospective on gaming by gathering a group of today’s kids, having them play classic video games, and recording their comments. This year’s version (Part II) is here; incredibly funny stuff. If possible, the original (Part I) is even funnier, if only because they had the kids try out Pong and ET: The Extra Terrestrial.

Happy New Year,

-avi

Displays / Industry

SED: Time to memorize a new acronym?

December 29, 2004 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

A blog quoting a Japanese source suggests that Toshiba is abandoning LCD and plasma and instead putting its display R&D into yet another display technology: SED. SED stands for Surface-Conduction Electron-emitter Display, which, if I understand it correctly – and I probably don’t – is an array of millions of tiny tube TV sets. Advantages include many of the same claims made for another technology working its way through the labs, OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode – don’t you just love these terms?):

really really thin
incredibly bright, sharp images
more energy efficient than plasma
a technology that [insert Korean or Japanese competitor here] doesn’t already have locked up

I’m convinced that performance is almost irrelevant: whichever technology is cheapest and can be manufactured in volume will win. Consumers have shown that they have absolutely no understanding of the technologies, and retailers have shown absoultely no capability of explaining the differences between them. Resolution and picture quality doesn’t even seem to matter much – consumers are snapping up EDTV panels at far higher rates than HD-capable displays. As such, consumers are basically buying these things based on depth and price.

I’m sure that next week at CES we’ll see gigantic LCD displays, enormous plasmas, and ever-larger OLED prototypes, and that we’ll all be falling over ourselves discussing why LCD is better than plasma or vice versa. But thus far, the bottom line has been: is it thin enough not to overwhelm a room, and, if so, how much does it cost?

-avi

PC Convergence

Workable PC Convergence Demands More Convergence, Less PC

December 28, 2004 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

I was interviewing a custom installer about using PCs as video scalers, and he said something that applies, more or less, to any serious use of PCs for home theaters: the only way to have a reliable PC-based A/V system is to have a PC dedicated solely to A/V. I’ve had several XP Media Center Edition systems in over the past couple of years, and that’s certainly one way to do it. The downside to Media Center PCs is that they’re pricey if you don’t need the full suite of functionality, and though they’ve gotten much better, they are still more complicated than a standalone ReplayTV/TiVo/iPod/DVD player.

But dealing with regular XP on my test PC has been a nightmare lately, proving the basic truth to the dedicate-it-and-forget-it ethos. Logitech was kind enough to send over a Z-5500 THX approved multimedia speaker system last month, so I felt obligated to review it at some point, rather than have the large box just sit in the corner, unloved. But before I installed it, I wanted to run my regular audio tests on the competition – Klipsch’s ProMedia 5.1 system, another THX multimedia system I’ve had for the past year or two. I barely got started.

Preventing me from getting consistent, accurate multichannel audio:

Unreliable audio drivers for my aftermarket 7.1 audio card. Even for just stereo listening I needed to set the bass redirection control manually three times.
Random system slowdowns when playing back DVDs (it appears to skip a frame every second or so).
Poor software design, specifically the bizzare placement of audio settings enabling 5.1 DVD playback buried four levels deep in one of the media player software’s most obscure menu trees.

True, much of this is my fault. It’s a test box, after all, and I’ve put countless versions of video rendering software, media playback software, aspect ratio control doodads, music device sync software, DVD-Audio and DTS decoding engines, etc. on it. I also use the box for web surfing, finance, photo editing, vector graphics, children’s software – you name it. Somewhere along the way, the basic audio drivers and system performance got warped. Given enough time and PC expertise, I can fix it. But it’s a clear reminder that the flexibility of PC-based systems can be in direct conflict with ease of use and reliability.

-avi

Accessories / Displays

Are Furniture Vendors In Too Deep?

December 22, 2004 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

It’s right before CES, and I’m inundated with press releases. Bell’O sent over a preview of their 2005 lineup, and I noticed something that struck a nerve: like all furniture vendors, they claim that their stands are ideal for hot selling rear projection TVs using digital technologies (DLP, LCD, and LCOS). They even go so far as to list a few specific models such as Sony’s 60" Grand WEGA LCD TV. Except that the stand doesn’t match the TV’s depth. None of them do. All the stands are at least 19" deep, and most are 21" – 24", while the new TVs range from 6.75" deep for new DLP sets from RCA and InFocus to 14 – 17" deep sets from nearly everyone else.

This isn’t unique to Bell’O – when I went to buy a stand for my shiny new LCOS-based HDTV I couldn’t find any stands that were the right depth (I ended up making a short term compromise and just getting something super-cheap at IKEA, but that stand will eventually be replaced).

Consumers are willing to spend more money on shallow non-CRT HDTVs precisely because they don’t stick out and dominate the room as much. Why would they want furniture that negates the shallow depth they paid extra for?

-avi