What's happening in HDTV land?

It has been several months since my last blog entry on the subject of HDTV. Believe it or not, not much has happened. Somethings are on the verge of happening, but we currently have a lot of vapor-ware floating around on the web. For those who do not know, Vapor-ware is any product promised and rumored to be out on the market, which cannot be found anywhere. We cheat a bit, and apply this term to any product which is perpetually promised to be "Out Soon" but which never seems to actually appear on the market.

So let's begin with the products that have actually entered the market and continue from there.

Mitsubishi's WD-82837 and WD-82737

Mitsubishi has upped the ante in the size wars by releasing the WD-82837($3,600-$4400) and the WD-82737 ($3,000-$3,500). As the name implies, both are 82 inch DLP televisions. Both televisions provide you with 3d capabilities.

I was disappointed by the quality of both of these giants. The reason has everything to do with the brightness of the picture. It seems that all Mitsubishi DLPs, regardless of size, are currently powered by a 180 watt light bulb. Does anything strike you wrong about this picture? It should. The larger you scale the picture, the more you will diffuse and disburse a finite quantity of Lumins. Naturally, the larger the screen, the dimmer the image. It is clear to me that 180w is optimal for 65 inches. It is not quite optimal for 73 inches. It is well below optimal for 82 inches.

These are the last of the classic DLP avengers, say most of the critics. After these models, it will be Laser TV forever more from Mitsubishi. It should be noted that Laser TV is the next logical step in DLP technology. The chip used to convert HDMI signals into Laser strokes on the screen remains the Texas Instruments DLP chip. The only element that changes is the light bulb. It disappears and is replaced with low-intensity LED lasers.

LaserVue

Speaking of LaserTV, many of us are sitting around with bated breath waiting for the--supposedly--immanent announcement of the 2nd generation of LaserVue. Details are extremely sketchy, but many of us expect this to be really big. Really big.

There were lots of quality and manufacturing issues in the first edition of LaserVue. Still, when all was said and done, many critics out there praised LaserVue as the highest quality image that could be had at any price, and given any form of technology. In other words, the slam-dunk leader in pure image quality. Many said that when the Pioneer Kuro was still on the market.

Once the quality and manufacturing problems were solved, LaserVue L65-A90 fell from the hoary air of $7,000 to a mere $5000 at several outlets. It works better these days also. Many would-be NDA busters have suggested that the 2nd coming will will be all that and a bag of chips. Improvements in design and manufacturing should up quality even further, while bringing the cost down to something more like an affordable level.

LaserVue still has to fight the fashion war, but I personally would like nothing better that to see Mitsubishi Godzilla press-slam in the faces of all the gay Austrian fashion designers like Bruno out there in HDTV land. Yes, that's right, I am saying that those who buy televisions just because they are 1.2 inches thick are a bunch of gay Austrian fashion designers like Bruno.

Toshiba Cell-TV

Probably the most stunning announcements this year have come from Toshiba. Toshiba is done licking its wounds over HD-DVD. They have introduced Blu-Ray units. Now they are about to use the brain of the PS3 to deliver what could be the greatest single HDTV on the market. If anything has the power to rain on LaserVue's coronation parade, it will be Toshiba Cell-TV.

Essentially Cell-TV boils down to a 55inch LCD screen which is LED lit, and supports a resolution of 3840 X 20160. This doubles the resolution of a 1080p signal on both axes. The result is 400% more resolution. Rather than 2 megapixels, you get 8 megapixels. Anyone who has ever used a digital camera or two will tell you that there is a world of difference between a 2mp and an 8mp picture. 2mp is adequate, not thrilling. 8mp can be professional grade.

Naturally, a chorus of objections rise echoing the question "where will you get an 8mp signal?" That is where the Cell Broadband engine comes into play. The first notion is to take your 1080p and 1080i HDTV signals and upscale them. It will work better with a 1080p Blu-Ray. There is more information encoded in the broader and fatter bitstream Blu-Ray provides.

How well will upscaled Blu-Ray work and how good will it look? According to the bullshit, it works better than upscaling DVDs does. You only need a 400% increase, and you start with a much better signal. DVD requires a 600% upscale, and you must fetch this mag from an inferior encoding technology and a skinnier signal. Those who have seen it declare that it is a gob-smacking, flabbergasting, freak-out experience.

Now for the problems? LCD is still prone to a lot of jutter and motion blur. The Cell Broadband engine cannot help you with this problem. Further, it's going to be both difficult and expensive to manufacture a single panel 55 inches in hypotenuse which contains 8 million LCD pixels. The price is said to be around $11,000.00 USD. Finally, it is scheduled to be only 55 inches in hypotenuse, which is no longer all that impressive a size. I would call it the minimum mandatory HDTV size for the HDTV experience.

It would be much better if this technology were applied to an 82 inch DLP with a 275 watt bulb. Then you would be able to harvest the benefits of 8 mpixel scaling.

OLED

Batten down the hatches. I am ready to blow. You'll have to pardon me for talking smack for a few moments here...

What's happening on the OLED front? Absolutely nothing. At least, nothing big. The Zune HD just came out. At a whopping 3,3 inches in size, OLED has proven that it is ready for prime time. Surely it will crush all competitor technologies in the HDTV space.

Yep, 3.3 > 82. Also (272 x 480) > (3840 x2160). Reductio absurdum.

I understand that there will be a 40 inch OLED early in 2012, according to one published report. The price cannot be determined at this time, but they think they can get it down to $11,000. Oh jeeze, that's just fucking great. I guess they are hopping for a lot of inflation and COLAs to make that figure look more attractive. Aren't you just dying to buy a 40inch HDTV for $11,000

Some other blurb mentioned that OLED will become cheaper than LCD by 2016. Really? You don't say? I guess I will postpone my purchases until 2016 then. Your authority means a lot to me.

Honestly folks, I have no idea why we continue to countenance these OLED fools. I do not suffer fools lightly or well. I grow increasingly disgusted with technology gurus who continue to propound that OLED is the thing of the future, and it is coming soon. Fuck you.

LCD

A massive number of shots have been fired in the LCD wars. When the dust settled three one model stands at the summit of the tournament: Samsung Luxia 8500. Yep, that's right, there is already an 8500 in the clan. The big difference is that this one is not edge lit by edge LEDs. There are a large number of LEDs in an Array directly behind the LCD panel.

The array of LEDs behind the screen increase the thickness of the Luxia 8500 vis-a-vis the 8000, but this is of no consequence. Only gay fashion designers from Austria--like Bruno--are concerned about the thickness of their HDTVs. If you are concerned about the thickness of your HDTV, you are just plain damn wrong.

The Luxia 8500 is a so-called 240hz, 2ms model. As with all LCD motion-smoothing technology, you have to like the SOAP OPERA EFFECT (SOE), or your won't like the HDTV. I have learned to live with it, but I don't like it.

For some reason I can hardly understand, LCD continues to be the most popular HDTV format. This is in spite of the fact that it is the most expensive technology (inch for inch), not even close to the largest screen format, and far from the most ideal technology for fast-motion sports and action movies. Both plasma and DLP are a hell of a lot better, but the people don't seem to understand this. I myself was conned into buying a Luxia 7000 not long ago. I cannot wait to trade this thing in on a LaserVue 2.0.

Take it from an unhappy camper: LCD is not the best technology for your movies and sports.

Bye Bye Pioneer

The HDTV illuminati are disconsolate and drowning in tears. They are going to lay down and cry for a hundred years.

This week, we confirmed that Pioneer is exiting the HDTV business entirely. They aren't just dropping their famous Kuro Plasma line. They are getting out of the business of HDTVs. No Lasers. No LCDs. No DLPs. Nothing. Pioneer is out.

This brought howls of dismay from the HDTV critics, who have routinely showered Kuro with every award and superlative they could muster. The basic line goes like this “It is sad that customers won't pay for the superior quality of Pioneer. This shows that there is a race to the bottom as vendors try to cut cost in this era of economic crisis.”

Well, that is pretty nice bullshit, but bullshit none the less. Let me set the record straight: Pioneer isn't quiting because people are too stupid to recognize quality when they see it, or too cheap to pay for it when they see it. Nope. That ain't the reason at all. Pioneer got run out of the plasma market by Panasonic. Panasonic beat the hell out of them. Panasonic simply made bigger, cheaper and better looking plasma screens that Pioneer. I am talking about better image quality and better styling at the same time. Pioneer could not compete with Panasonic, and they knew it, so they quit.

As long as Panasonic is around, there simply is no reason for any rational consumer to spend $6000 on a 60 inch Kuro 151FD. You could have a 65 inch PZ850U for about $4500 instead. Plasma consumers opted for the latter in 2008. Pioneer was awash in red ink.

As I have said several times in this blog: The Kuro isn't what it is cracked up to be. It is a strong performer, but quite overrated. Certainly not the best HDTV money can buy. There was certainly a cult of Kuro during its existence, but having a cult following does not prove superiority. Plan 9 From Outer Space has a cult following. It is far from the greatest film ever made.

I don't know why, but experts get locked in an Ivory Tower echo chamber sometimes. They seem to be lemmings with herding instincts. Each year in the NFL draft, the critics get hot for some prospect who surely turns into a bust. They overlook good kids who turn into all-pros. Joe Montana was drafted in the 3rd round. Kurt Warner wasn't drafted at all. So it is with movies and so it is with HDTVs. Tim Couch and David Carr were both selected #1 overall. The NFL (regretably) showed these two to be failures. Likewise, the market has rendered its verdict on Pioneer's Kuro: Kuro is a non-viable product. This means the evaluators were wrong in their initial assessments.

Some perfectly marvelous HDTVs get mediocre reviews—or no coverage at all—just because there isn't strong mind share behind them. I don't believe HDTV critics have a real scientific methodology, despite their attempts to cloak reviews in the shroud of Science. Speaking of the Pseudo Science of HDTV reviews, let's debunk that bullshit right here and now.

There is a standard called ITU BT.709. It is sometimes mistakenly called Rec.709 by the TV critics. BT.709 is an International Telecommunications Union standard. This standard defines the pixel count, pixel depth, frame rates, and color space of HDTV. The standard can be found here. It is a digital electronics standard just like any other digital electronics standard. It was formed in the same way that all standards are formed.

Now, I happen to know something about digital electronics standards. I am a programmer with more than 14 years of professional experience and about 27 years of total experience. I have to deal with ANSI, ECMA and ISO all the fucking time. I know how these standards get formed. A number of experts are drawn from major industry firms. These experts are gathered together somewhere in the world for a conference. They are sequestered in a room once or twice. You usually have just two physical meetings. The rest of the time, the experts collaborate online for about a year or two. They vote many times by email or webform. In the end, they publish a massive document which few people ever read. This document defines the industry.

What is important about this story is that it is a messy political process, dominated by industry titans with a commercial agenda. There may be one or two technology purists on the team, but any standard SIG is comprised mostly of pragmatic business-minded men... And they are always men.

BT.709 was formed by a number experts from the largest TV firms in the world. They negotiated a product which they felt they could manufacture and sell at a reasonable profit. That was the goal. Just as surely as the first ECMA standard for C# did not define a perfect or complete language, the ITU standard for HDTV did not define the philosophically perfect spec for HDTV. They are nowhere near the logical limit of visual quality in BT.709.

BT.709 is just one conclusion among many possibilities. It is just one compromise solution which got enough votes to pass out of the standards committee. It is the spec we have. It is the spec we work with, but it isn't perfect, I can assure you of this.

In the case of any standard, there are always weaknesses. There are always obvious points where you can go above and beyond the spec and achieve much better results. Exceeding the spec is no sin. Computer firms do it all the time, with delightful results. God, where in the world would we be if NVIDIA and ATI hadn't pushed way beyond the spec for VGA and SVGA?

Whenever I read reviews of the Kuro the critics always seem to propound the fidelity of the Kuro to the BT.709 standard. Repeatedly, they state that the Kuro is the only HDTV to nail the spec perfectly. Repeatedly, they chastise inferior HDTVs for failing to hit the spec. Repeatedly, they critique better HDTVs for exceeding the spec. Mitsubishi has been criticized many times for exceeding the spec.

I can understand why you chastise HDTVs which fail on the low side. This is justified. I do not agree with criticizing firms who exceed the spec on the high side. Unless you believe BT.709 is the perfect and logical limit of video quality, firms should try to exceed BT.709. This is no sin. To characterize it as a sin is just flat cold wrong. Rather, it is progressive improvement.

Ergo the cult of Kuro is simply predicated on bad ideology. That is all. Only this and nothing more. Kuro has been crowed the king by those who hold fast to this faulty ideology. There is no need to take them seriously. Their lamentations are a tale told by an idiot full or sound and fury signifying nothing.

If you happen to be one of these poor players, strutting and fretting upon the stage, only to be heard no more, I have some good news for you. It goes like this.

HDTV is a field strongly allied to the semiconductor industry. HDTV is an example of digital science and engineering. As such, it is subject to Alan Moore's law. Moore's law basically says that we double the density of transistors on any given dice size every 18 months. This means we basically double to power and sophistication of our digital electronics products every 18 months.

If you are upset that Kuro is gone, just wait 18 months. In 18 months Vizio and Phillips will be making flat pannels superior to the current Pioneer Elite Kuro Pro 151FD.

3d a smash at CES? LaserVue puts plasma to shame...?

Or so they say here. Supposedly, 3d ready HDTVs like Mitsubishi's DLPs and Panasonic's Plasmas are the rage right now at CES. What is a 3d ready HDTV? It basically an HDTV which can take any Blu-Ray {and perhaps any HDMI digital input} and transform the standard flat 2d picture into a stereoscopic picture. This means you can sit in front of the DiamondScan or the Viera and watch Dark City, or Apocalypto or No Country for Old Men in 3d. All you need are the customary glasses. The original authors and engineers of the film and disk do not need to do anything special to permit this stereoscopic feature to function. Its all done, post-process, with our marvelous silicone digital signal processing technology.

Although I have never been a particular fan of 3d movies, I must admit, this is cool feature. It would be fun and cool to try it out with my library. It would give me a reason to go back and watch all my favorites again. I am skeptical it will work well {this technology has never worked well in my estimation} but it would be fun to try it. Based on the enthusiasm for the tech, it must be working better than I would presume.

But then again...

We come to the issue of LaserVue. If you read my past blog entries, you know what I think about LaserVue: Its a fraud. The emperor has no cloths on. I say this is as a commited DLP fan who wishes it would work. I am more likely to buy a Mitsubishi DiamondScan 835 than a LaserVue right now, and not because of LaserVue's price. I would finance it, if I though it would work better. It does not.

Nevertheless, somehow, someway, the lovely Alix Steel [will you marry me babby?] is all bubbly about how LaserVue puts Plasma to shame. She even embedded a small res video in her post to prove it... not that such a proof can prove her point. I hope you are right, Alix, but I am highly skeptical. One thing I will say is this: You are girl after my own heart. Image quality is more important than skinny screens.

I vow that I will give LaserVue another look soon. It may be that Mitsubishi debugged their shtick in the past few months. I was expecting major improvement with the next gen. So far we have no generational landmark, but Mitsubishi may be making improvements to the LaserVue firmware. This process did wonders for my mighty PS3.

In my last survey of the market, Panasonic's marvelous Viera PZ850 series proved itself to be a serious contender for the championship. If the LaserVue can put such a screen 'to shame' it will be worth every penny of the $7,000 they are asking for it. It is no mean task to crush the PZ850 series or the Pioneer Kuro Elite Pro.