So what about 3d?

I am a great lover of technology. I am quick to embrace any possible improvement. I am what is commonly known as "an early adopter". The second HDTV seemed even remotely good, I dived into the pool head-first. For the record, this was late 2006 when the XBox360 got it's HD-DVD attachment and the PS3 was about to be released (signifying the arrival of Blu-Ray).

The arrival of true 1080p disks signified to me that this market was about to mature.

So what about 3d? Have I adopted that? Nope. Do I have plans to adopt it soon. Nope. Do I have any plans to adopt it? Not really. Why? Because every demo I have seen, save one, sucks hard. This is not at all unlike the 3d effects we see in the movie theater: They suck hard.

I'm going to be perfectly frank with you good folks: 3d leave me cold. I am not excited. The major reason is that the movie produces don't do anything with the media. An occasional shot which pops out at you is not worth the annoyance of the glasses. Even the most advanced 3d movie ever made, which is Avatar, still made relatively limited use of 3d.

Even when the true 1080p 3d Blu-Rays begin to arrive, which they have not, I still doubt that there is much power in the media itself.

Of course, this does not prevent marketing forces from attempted to persuade you to 'upgrade' to a 3d set. Mark ye well the following example of marking hype:

If you check out an in-store demo, you'll likely be impressed by 3D. We recently spent some quality time with Panasonic's VT25 3D plasma watching Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs and it was a blast. After all, 3D adds depth and, when it's done right, can make you feel like you're inside the picture. -PC Magazine

All I can say to that is "bullshit" and "thank you for regurgitating the predigested marking hype from the advertising companies... oh wait! I forgot! PC Magazine is a marking/advertising company." In sooth, they always have been.

The quote above is proceeds from a false premise, uses fallacious logic and reaches and erroneous conclusion. Almost no one has a VT25 HDTV on display, must less equipped with the several-hundred dollars worth of glasses necessary to do 3d. Worst of all, if you have seen it, and I have, there is no there there. There's nothing special going on. The demo left me flat. I didn't want it.

Inevitably, sooner or later, I will want to buy a new HDTV. Moore's law guarantees progress in all of the basic areas of HDTV quality. I will want that increase in core-competency at some point in the future. Upgrade day may not come for two years, but sooner or later, it will come.

No doubt, this will bring 3d along with it. 3d is being rolled into all HDTVs as we speak. This will become a default feature of all HDTVs soon. You won't be able to buy a current model year without it. However, my reason for buying will not be 3d. The shit just doesn't do anything for me.

To you folks in the industry: I have to say that I really believe you are wasting your time with this 3d jazz. It is much more difficult to interpolate a 3d layer from 2d sources than it is to upscale 1080p to the so-called 4K standard. It is much more difficult for the creative film maker to shoot a movie in 3d than it is to shoot the movie in 4K with a simple RedCam.

I believe the difference between 1080p and so-called 4k is far more dramatic, far more stunning and far more desirable than the anything 3d has ever thrown at me. Every photographer and graphic artist will tell you that more pixels are better. Higher resolution is better resolution. Every gamer will tell you a higher res screen is a better screen. Every computer user will tell you that more screen real estate is better.

If I were you, I would toss the 3d thing on the back burner and work hard on the 4K thing. I will upgrade immediately for a reasonably priced 4K screen. 3d holds no interest for me.

So California just banned power hungry HDTVs?

It would appear that our famous California Energy Commission has placed new & sharp limits on HDTV power consumption. These rules go into effect in 2011, so the change is not eminent. The rules govern power consumption for all HDTVs 58 inches and smaller. The new rules specify hard caps for how much wattage an HDTV at any given size can consume. For instance, in the year 2011, 42 inch HDTVs cannot exceed 183 watts. In 2013, 42s will be cut down lower to 116 watts.

What is the impact of this supra-legislative action? About 75% of all HDTVs currently on the market will meet the 2011 requirements. That is an easy jump. Only about 21% of the 1,400 known HDTV models will be vendible in 2013. About 300 of our current HDTVs will be able to remain on the market about 4 years from now.

The industry's response was to scream. They declared that this action would force the industry to cut image quality and features. Oh really? Some of your best quality models actually meet the current spec. For instance, my 55inch Luxia 7000 meets the spec. My intended, the LaserVue, would not be impacted at all by this spec. Even the power-hog 60 inch Panasonic Kuro would be vendible in 2013. By all accounts, these three HDTVs belong at the top of the heap in terms of quality.

So what in the devil are the HDTV vendors crying about? Let us do a more logical and rational assessment of the situation.

1. If you want to make a smaller HDTV (smaller than 58 inches) you better make sure that it is based on the very latest efficient technology.
2. This will raise the price.
3. You better make sure it is not bloated with stupid features, such as an integrated DVD player.
4. This will lower the price, and produce more focused products.
5. Both facts will enhance the quality of the HDTV, not reduce it.
6. Old stock will have to liquidated at any price necessary to clear it.
7. This would put smaller and worse quality technology in the hands of precisely the people who can least afford to foot the power bill: The poor!
8. The poor will gladly buy these liquidation units anyway, completely oblivious of the cost of ownership
9. You can make the case that this is rational policy, as it has several coherent effects. It forces bad stock off the market. It makes future stock better. This helps both the poor and the middle class. It prevents Cali from needing to build more power infrastructure. It will allow the rich to continue doing anything they like.
10. That is how you define a rational policy in governmental terms.

So why are HDTV companies crying? Nobody likes supra-legislative bodies. Nobody likes it when an unelected group steps hard on your neck. There are a lot of lame and crappy HDTVs that will be flat-cold killed by this action. Low-power features such as LED back-lighting will have to become the norm. Older and inferior tech will be killed outright.

Basically, the industry doesn't like the fact that they will have to kill (early in their minds) a series of low cost HDTVs that they think are perfectly fine machines. They don't like the fact that they will have to clear them from the market during 2010, and probably at painfully low prices. They don't like the fact that they won't be allowed to bilk old architecture for a bit more profit in the low-end market. All of this adds up to lower margins or higher prices or both for the next several years.

One technology is going to get hit hard by these changes: Plasma. One company in particular has much to loose: Panasonic. Although Panasonic has made strides in reducing Plasma power consumption over the past two years, Plasma still consumes a lot more wattage than LaserVue or LED LCD.

So here is how we would expect this legislation to play out.

1. LCD vendors will have to complete the transition to LED back lighting, and limit stupid features. Old stock will have to be purged soon. Expect fire sales soon.
2. DLP & Laser vendors can keep on doing whatever the hell they want, as long as it is bigger than 58 inches. Since both are pretty power efficient, I would not expect 56 inch models to be harmed by this move.
3. Plasma is going to get hammered. Expect small plasmas to disappear from the market. Expect plasma to get larger than 58 inches.

If I were to evaluate this as a partisan fan of DLP and LaserVue, I would be pleased. This move will place the two competitor technologies under great stress. It will leave DLP and LaserVue alone. Eventually, it will flush Plasma in our direction (really big screens), but this will not be soon.

The Samsung UN-55B7000

Guess what? I sold my old Samsung HL-S6187W this week. It was tough saying goodbye to that good old friend. I was very sad as I drove it to its new home in my Toyota Tundra. This all took place on Wednesday April 15 around 8:30 PST. Nevertheless, I followed through and completed the deal.

Naturally, this begat a frantic search for its successor. In 72 hours there were many twists and turns, frustrations and angers, and a couple of shocking discoveries. I will give you the serious low down on my technological discoveries in the next blog. I have a few sharp point to pass on to you in this short blog:

1. LED LCD has now surpassed classical DLP in terms of image quality. This could never be said before. Right now, both the internet and the major HDTV vendors are ablaze with excitement over the new Samsung B7000 series LED LCD HDTVs. They should be. This unit now offers the finest picture quality of anything on the market... at least until the B8000 hits the streets in about 1 month. That is no joke. The B8000 is scheduled to arrive inside one month.

2. The bizzare co-inky-dink is that the worlds thinnest 55inch LCD also happens to be the television with the highest image quality on the market today. This has never been true before this moment. Thin HDTVs uniformly sacrificed image quality for skinny looks, until now. Somehow, Samsung cut the Gordian Knot. They somehow packed the best picture into the thinnest form factor. It should be noted that CNET already has ranked The Samsung B7000 series as the #2 most desirable HDTV behind the Pioneer Elite Kuro, which is now defunct and discontinued. I guess that makes my HDTV the defacto #1.

3. To set the whole deal on fire, the UN-55B7000, which is the 55 inch implementation, can be had for a mere $3200 at Fry's electronics this weekend. That is $600 below retail price. How about no shipping or installation charges? Just drive 1 mile and get it now? I'll play the sales tax this time.

4. Not impressive enough? How about the fact that they will toss in a $300 Samsung BD-P1600 Blu-Ray player for free? Basically, this means you can have the world's finest 55inch thin flat for approximately $2,900.00. Shocking! This size in this form factor couldn't be touched for less than $5000 just 6 months ago. The price has fallen $2100, seemingly overnight, and the quality has gotten much better. Thanx Gordon Moore! You're doing one hell of job!

Naturally this was all too much for me to resist. I made the deal today, April 18, 2008 at about 3:00pm. The deal was cinched at Fry's electronics in Woodland Hills, just 1 mile from my apartment. It is already setup and tuned up. I have been tuning it all evening with the help of my favorite channel: The NFL network. I have just about all the team jersies, I know all the team colors intimately. Ergo this is the best place to go for color, brightness, contrast and noise calibration.

LCD is a shock to the system. The character and quality of the picture is entirely different from what most people are accustomed too. Most of us grew up watching movies on Cathode Ray Tubes and on theater projectors. DLP has all of these qualities and improves upon them. This is why high-end theaters such as the Archlight use DLP projectors. This is why many of us have found DLP to be the most pleasing movie experiance over the past several years.

As a people and a generation, we not accustomed to the look of LCD. Liquid Crystal has a totally different character from the CRTs and projection systems we grew up with in the theater and at home. It looks quite different from my old and trusted friend, the DLP. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I didn't quite like it at first. It is like the difference between eatting off a clay plate and an aluminum plate. Either way you eat, but you are conditioned to expect clay. Aluminum is better and more durable, but we have been conditioned to expect clay.

If there is a problem with this television it is found in hyper-accuracy. An old friend of mine, Ryan the Sheepdog, used to listen to his music through studio reference quality Tannoy monitors. These are the sort of studio monitors Quincy Jones would be happy to use when producing an album by Stevie Wonder. The sound was astounding. He paid a small fortune for them ($8000). Ryan used to say that the problem with these speakers is that they would sound off every flaw and every blemish in the audio signal. They were hyper-accurate. They were almost too accurate.

Well folks, the Samsung UN-55B7000 is a lot like that. If you have a flawed video signal, it will look like shit on the UN-55B7000. The DLP was much more forgiving. If you have a sensational picture, it is going to look mesmerizing and astounding on the UN-55B7000. It looks much better than on the DLP. This became crystal clear in the first hour of watching the HDTV.

Let me tell you about my experiance.

The NFL network was showing a documentary called The Top 10 Power Backs when I powered-up my new HDTV for the first time. Like all such historicals, this documentary was a hoge-podge of very old and decrepid footage, as well as very recent and high quality images. The decrepit stuff looks like utter shit on the UN-55B7000. I found this very disconcerting, and I was on the verge of a serious disappointment.

Then I discovered TBN was showing the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy back-to-back in true high definition. They were on the final leg of Return of the King when I first tuned in. Frodo was about to enter the Crack of Doom. It was pretty damn amazing. This was the first moment when the disappointment began to abate, and I started to get happy.

It just so happens that the NFL network was also re-broadcasting Super Bowl XLIII at the same time. This was our most recent Super Bowl, the Steelers vs. Cardinals. Of course, no expense was spared in broadcasting and recording this even. The signal is as good as an it gets in today's world. I flipped channels back and forth and kept calibrating. It looked pretty great right away, but there were problem. I did need to adjust the 120Hz motion smoothing. The factory settings did a lot of weird things to the slow motion instant replays. I finally decided on a custom setting of 7 for blur control and 7 for jitter control. None of the factory presets worked well for me. The jitters were very disturbing at first, but they are now under control. I recommend these settings to my fellow football fans.

Finally, it came time for a Blu-ray, arguably my favorite toy. Most friends and family members would have expected me to do this first, but I really wanted to calibrate with the NFL network before moving on to the Blu-ray. What I saw was pretty shocking. This was the moment when the UN-55N7000 convinced me that it was actually better (not just more fashionable) than my old HL-S6187W. This was the moment when two-reps of the Moore's Law became blindingly apparent. When they talk about dark inky blacks, they are understating the case. When they speak of butter-smooth imagery, they are understating the case. When they speak of razor sharp super-detailed images, they are utterly falling short of reality. The sharpness and detail is beyond belief. When they speak of dazing color, they are pretty much on track.

I have been an advocate of Blu-Ray for about two years now. I used to tell people that the difference between Blu-ray and HD Satellite is equivalent to the difference between DVD and Cable. Cable looks good. DVD looks better. Likewise (I used to say) HD Satellite looks good, Blu-ray looks better. Well folks, I am going to have reformulate that statement. That just doesn't give Blu-ray enough credit. It falls short by a long shot. The difference between HD Satellite and Blu-Ray is pretty sick. It is much, much greater than the difference between Cable and DVD. Blu-Ray makes DirectTV's HD package look poor by comparison. That is no joke. Give it a try on this HDTV and see for yourself.

If you are planning to get the UN-55B7000, you better get it this weekend at Fry's. They will toss in the Blu-Ray player for free. If you have not yet been exposed to Blu-Ray, you are going to have an absolute freak-out experience. You will know why the movie lovers, particularly profession movie critics, just love Blu-ray to death. If you already bought this TV and don't have a Blu-ray, you are missing out on the finest thing your investment has to offer you.

Why thin-flat HDTVs are rubbish: Wall mounting never happens.

Sadly, the world is crazy for thin-flat screens. The world is crazy for thin flats because everyone seems to have bought into a bullshit ideology. Yep, that's right, I said the ideology surrounding thin-flat screens is absolute bullshit, Worse, the poppycock vendors who advance this theory know full-well they are advocating bullshit. They are fully self-conscious bullshit vendors. The bullshit they argue goes a little like this:

You shouldn't buy a DLP screen because:

1. They are about 13 to 17 inches deep.
2. We all live in cramp spaces these days. Most of us are urban apartment renters, and living space is precious in an 800sqft apartment. The lucky ones get to live in a nice townhome.
3. If you wall mount a thin flat screen you will conserve living space, and you will have the most fashionable living-room presentation possible.

I have witnessed a number of friends and family members buy thin-flat LCDs for precisely this set of reasons, and not one of them has yet successfully mounted the unit upon the wall.

But... how can this be? Don't act shocked. My friends and family members are absolutely typical thin-flat buyers. They are statistically average. It turns out something like 87% of all people who buy thin-flats do so with the explicit intension of mounting the unit on the wall... and then they never follow through.

Why don't they follow through? When you witness family and friends go through this ordeal, the reasons become obvious.

• If you buy an HDTV, you are going to need a surround receiver, a Cable or Satellite box, and Blu-Ray player {no, not a DVD player}. You might want an HD TIVO if your company doesn't provide you with a good DVR. All of these components have to live somewhere. The best and most natural place inside media-center furniture, which is naturally equipped with shelf space to house these items. This unit will take 20 inches of space. Try to find something thinner. If you don't buy into the media center, and if you don't rack your video components here, you are opening a nasty can of worms.
• If you try to put your components in a closet, you are going to need a very good closet. Not everybody has one readily available in the family room. It better be air conditioned, because a good surround-receiver will generate plenty of heat. That heat builds up quickly in a confined, non-ventilated space. Heat kills electronic equipment.
• You will need to run a 25 foot to 50 foot HDMI cable to carry the signal from your closet to your HDTV. Speaking of running that cable, most interior decorator, fashion designers don't like the notion of having a 50 foot cable running through the living room. I laugh at them. The alternative is to punch a hole in the wall and have a truly professional handyman run the HDMI cable to that hot closet that disables your remote controls. That is expensive. It is $3000 expensive. My friend Colin toyed with the idea of creating a false wall in front of his real wall in order to avoid this cost. The two costs turned out to be painfully similar. No free lunch folks.
• Once the components are locked in the closet, good luck in using your favorite remote controls. Most of them are Infrared. Infrared waves do not penetrate doors and walls. I guess you can't change the channels, or raise your volume anymore. Nice!
• Speaking of those poor urban apartment renters, good luck in getting the landlord to give you permission to punch holes in those rented walls and run HDMI cable to the closet. I have not seen one request granted yet. Owners don't like punching holes in the walls.
• If you capitulate, give up on wall mounting, and put that thin-flat on a component rack, you have a shelf which is 18 to 20 inches deep anyhow. Guess what? You didn't save any precious living space at all. Worse, you could have easily accommodated that much larger DLP which costs much less than your much more expensive and much smaller LCD. Nice! I bet you feel smart now. You could have had 73inches of DLP for less than those 52inches of LCD.