HDTV – Page 5 – Devices View

HDTV and Plastic Surgery

June 14, 2005 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

I maintain that the worst thing to hit to our "national pastime" (officially still baseball) is not steroid abuse, but HDTV. In high resolution closeups, players spitting chewing tobacco and "adjusting themselves" is far more offensive than Super Bowl halftime shows or Desperate Housewives previews. In a high def world, certain things have to change: performance enhancing drugs are fine – until they kill the athletes, they make their muscles look nice and ripped. But chaw, and polyester pants that gather in the crotch? Those have to go. It’s not that HDTV has so much resolution that you can see …

Yes, it was a live demo… also a misleading one

June 12, 2005 - by Avi Greengart - 1 Comment

Back in February I wrote about Microsoft’s Lightspeed IPTV demo at CES and linked to BusinessWeek’s skeptical coverage. Well, the magazine was just biding its time and this week they completely skewer the initiative (subscription required), highlighting the endless delays in commercializing it. It seems the impressive demo I saw at CES was real. The problem is that the technology doesn’t work for millions of users at once, which is kind of important for the operators who want to broadly deploy it. Live and learn. Still, TV over IP seems somewhat inevitable. Japan and Korea have DSL service 10x faster …

Displays / HDTV

Internet Persistence and Current TV Trends

March 30, 2005 - by Avi Greengart - 1 Comment

Home Theater View grew out of business weblogs at JupiterResearch and AskAvi columns written over several years at a personal site, http://www.greengart.com. Thanks to the persistence of the Internet — web pages never really die as long as they’re in Google’s index — one of those old AskAvi columns is now generating a lot of feedback. It seems someone queried Google to find advice choosing a TV, found Column 10, and posted it to a newsgroup. They did this without ever looking at the column’s date (which is on the page, though perhaps not as prominent as it could be). …

DVD / HDTV

Product Review: LG LST3510A HDTV tuner/DVD player

March 11, 2005 - by Avi Greengart - 4 Comments.

New connectivity options often drive product design, and DVI/HDMI is no exception. DVI and HDMI are interfaces that allow you to keep the signal in the digital domain throughout their journey, making hookup simpler, and providing a noticeably sharper picture when viewing digital content (such as DVD or HDTV) on digital displays (like plasma, LCD, DLP, or LCOS), as the signal is never converted back and forth to analog at all. I’ve already written about how computer-like interfaces open up the A/V cable market to new entrants, but every product in the A/V chain may need to change as well. …

Computing / HDTV

I Want My IP TV

February 1, 2005 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

The current issue of BusinessWeek has a nice overview of Microsoft’s efforts in IP TV (sending television feeds to a set top box over a broadband connection). It’s a bit skeptical, and focuses on how Microsoft has bent over backwards to address the needs of partners. For example, Microsoft’s brand does not appear on the set top box, and the boxes don’t even need to run a Microsoft operating system. I saw a demo of the system at CES, and BusinessWeek leaves out an important element of the story: it’s really, really cool. I suppose cable operators adopting this system …

Computing / Displays / HDTV / Industry

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 …

HDTV

Purpose-built HDTV antenna slightly better

December 6, 2004 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

In a completely unscientific test, Gemini/Zenith’s high tech HDTV antenna slightly beat out Jensen’s adjustable loop antenna in my basement. With proper windowsill placement, both can pick up seven over the air HDTV channels, and neither can pick up NBC no matter what I do. Neither of them get perfect reception: despite what you’ve heard about the "cliff effect" (the signal is either there or not there, as if dropping off a cliff), HDTV is not an all or nothing affair in my house. Perhaps it’s the grade of my street, the angle to the Empire State Building, or the …