HDTV and YOU!

[Afrobean]

tldr version: General information about HDTV, followed by the revelation that HD and BD (Blu-ray disc) are a lot better than you may realize and not as costly as you may think either.

Before I begin with the spiel about HDTV or even touch Blu-ray, I'll need to familiarize you the concepts of interlacing, de-interlacing, and progressive displays.

Interlacing is the method by which television has been displayed for ages, and it was developed as a means to conserve valuable bandwidth. Without this shortcut technique, the CRT screens of old wouldn't have been able to display the image fast enough to make the "animation" appear smoothly. The way it works is that rather than just displaying a frame, the frame is broken in half, each half called a field. When the screen renders the image, it displays the first field first, but the trick here is that the fields make up alternating horizontal rows. So the screen displays the first field, but every other line is empty. The second field contains all of the information which will fill those gaps between the rows. Traditional television is 25 frames per second, but in actuality, it's 50 fields per second. The reason you probably never noticed this happening is because it happens too fast for you to be able to tell, although it can actually become noticeable in instances of high action or slowmotion/stills. Notice that even today, broadcasts are interlaced, previous generations of gaming systems were interlaced (and even today retain the option of using composite RCA connectors), even VHS and DVD are interlaced by nature.

But the problem here is that high quality screens don't work the same way that CRTs of old did. In so few words, they're not designed to display frames as sets of fields, so images input into them need to be de-interlaced to be displayed. Without going into absurd detail, de-interlacing the image for display on high quality televisions makes the weaknesses of the technique much more apparent. It's not difficult to overlook interlacing's weaknesses on low res CRT screens, but when the image is de-interlaced onto a higher res screen, the "tearing" is much more apparent.

Truth be told, the highest quality choice here is progressive scan. Progressive scan is different from interlaced images in that each frame is displayed as a frame rather than as two separate fields. This is how media is filmed too, so this format is more natural all around, as well as better looking. Notice also that it is an HDTV's native method of choice for this. Furthermore, interlacing was only even developed to preserve bandwidth while maintaining higher resolution, and frankly, that's not an issue any more. After all, back in the 20s, a screen with vertical resolution of 440 pixels might have been mighty impressive compared to the 220 progressive equivalent, but we live in a day where images with 720 pixels of vertical resolution are beamed through the air like child's play. We needn't bind ourselves by the shortcuts our forefathers needed to take.

So then, you've got a basic understanding of interlacing and progressive displays, right? If not, take a look at the relevant wikipedia articles... Ok, then, next I'd like to touch on resolutions. Sorry for you Eurobutts out there, but I'll only be talking about NTSC formats, so no PAL for you...

Basic formats are as follows: 480, 720, 1080. There are a few others, but they're largely forgettable or not worthy of looking at in this case. The skinny on it is: 480 is standard definition, 720 is high definition (HD), and 1080 is full HD. Of these resolutions, there are interlaced and progressive possible and they are denoted by a "i" or "p" afterwards. For example, SD television broadcasts are 480i. HD television broadcasts are 720p (or in some cases, 1080i). But don't get complacent. There are 480p designations referred to as "Extended Definition", and 1080p is the format Blu-ray has a stranglehold on. I have prepared a simulated sample of each one below; note that 1080 is the image in its natural position. Click the image for a 2x zoom.







Things to notice between the comparison:

#1: The blue color on the left is actually a checkerboard pattern of two blue colors. This detail is lost on the 480 version and largely indistinguishable on 720. The same is true of the pinkish arc as well.

#2: The edges of the black. Particularly the text and the round arc.

#3: The only feature which does not appear to lose a large amount of definition is the gradient. Notice that the gradient looks rather smooth, even on the lowest resolution. This is one of the things that lower definition can skate by on.

Ok, so that's all out of the way, I want to briefly touch on aspect ratios before going further. Basically, SD has always been 4:3. This basically means it's a little wider than a square. HDTV is typically 16:9. This means that it's a lot wider than a square, and in fact, is not far from being 2x as wide as it is tall. This is a major benefit for watching movies, because the wider native screen allows for more efficient letterboxing (or no letterboxing at all in some cases).

So I guess at this point, you're probably thinking, "why is he bothering with this?" Well, it's simple, see, and here it is. I don't like the crap that gets slung about HD. I want more people to see the light. So now, I will do my best to debunk popular commentary regarding HD content/hardware.

You need special equipment to watch HDTV.

Not entirely true. All you really need is an HD capable set. If you wish to watch a movie on Blu-ray or some other sort of HD content from a settop box, you'll need to connect the device with a cable, it's true, but this is true of ANY device on ANY television. If you want to play your NES or a VHS on your VCR, you better have the cable to hook it up to your television just the same as you better have a set of component or HDMI cable to hook up your HD device.

But those cables are expensive and I have to buy that crap separately!

No, they are not expensive, and no, you do not have to buy it separately. Many devices may come packaged without an HD cable for connection, but it's not too difficult to find one with the cables included. Furthermore, things like HDMI cables are often gouged in retail outlets. They may charge 50~80~100+ for a single little digitial cable. Rip-off, plain and simple. Shop around and you can find HDMI cables for a lot less.

But what about the TV itself? That is expensive.

Sort of, but not exactly. A lot of folks think of an HDTV and they think of a 60 inch 1080p plasma. But they forget to think about the 20 inch 720p. They also tend to overlook the sorts of deals where they might give you a Blu-ray player or a few movies on BD to sweeten the deal. It's true that you'll almost certainly be spending more on an HD set, I will admit, but you'll be getting more for it as well. Better things will always cost more... or would you rather buy all of your movies on VHS? Rather do your gaming on an Atari 2600? I bet VHS and Atari cartridges are a lot cheaper to buy now than DVDs and Xbox 360 games.

Yeah, Blu-ray looks pretty good and all, but I can't afford a 1080p set!

The glorious thing about BD is that 1080p set is not necessary to enjoy it. The quality of BD on a 720p set is STILL remarkably higher than DVD on a SD set.

Even so, Blu-ray players are still pretty new, and I can't afford to drop 400 dollars on a fancy movie player.

Commendable, but the fact is, you simply don't have to. Blu-ray players are getting cheaper and cheaper all the time. The cheapest of them are now under 200 dollars, and if you get a great deal on one of them, you can save even more. Personally, I recently bought a BD player on Amazon.com on a special deal where I got 100 dollars off of a ~200 dollar player. The only stipulation on the deal was that I bought 4 movies from a select list, but I didn't have any problem picking out 4 titles from their list.

Yeah, I don't mind buying DVDs of movies I already owned on VHS because the quality improvement was amazing, but the step up from DVD to BD isn't as good.

This is simply not true. VHS's vertical resolution was around 250 pixels, although it varied from tape to tape and from VCR to VCR. DVD upped this to 480. That's nearly a 2x increase in resolution, so yeah, that's pretty great. But consider DVD versus BD. BD has 1080 pixels of vertical resolution, while DVD manages less than half of that at 480. That's not a noteworthy upgrade in picture quality? Then there's the simple fact of switching to progressive scan, something that is a major boon for films due to the fact that the BD can display the frames exactly as they were originally recorded.

But I have dozens of DVDs already. I don't want to rebuy my entire collection!

The glorious thing is that you don't have to. Even as DVDs become obsolete, far off in the future, your BD player will still be able to play all of your old DVDs. Can your DVD player play your old VHS tapes so easily? And another great thing here is that some DVDs can be upconverted very well, so even if you refuse to replace DVDs (I can relate to this sentiment myself), your DVDs can find new life on your BD player.

Wait a minute! I don't want to be paying 3x as much for BD titles as I would be for DVDs of the same film!

Blu-ray discs aren't 3x as expensive as DVDs. They're not even 2x. Heck, considering the deals I mentioned already, you can actually get some movies for cheaper on BD. But that aside, a BD title shouldn't cost more than a few dollars more than a comparable new DVD title. Notice that the 5 dollar DVDs that you cling to are only so cheap because of how old those movies are or how poorly they're selling. New titles on DVD don't go so cheap. And you need to shop around too. Of course your local Best Buy is going to charge 10~15 dollars more for BD vs. DVD (actually, mine is only like 5~10 at most, but I digress). You just have to look around at prices and not get suckered in by overpriced garbage. Amazon, for example, tends to have great BD prices (and great special deals too!). For instance, The Dark Knight shall be coming out soon; Amazon prices the DVD at 21.49 and the BD at 23.99. In all fairness, they also have an issue on DVD for only 15.99, but that's single disc and doesn't include ANY special features it seems.

Sorry, but I heard Blu-ray was dying.

Who told you that? Blu-ray beat out HD-DVD as the HD format of choice for the future. And if BD was to fail, what? You think DVD is going to last forever? Digital distribution, right? Quick question: do you know how much bandwidth you'd burn to download a single 1080p movie? Do you know how much harddrive space would be taken up with a single movie? Take a look at the music industry, because that's what we'll be seeing once digital distribution works its magic a little more in the distant future-- we'll be able to pay money to download movies over the internet, and we'll "own" the movie in digital form only, OR we can choose to go a store and purchase a physical copy of the same film to own. Just because digital distribution becomes possible doesn't mean the end of physical copies, not so long as people continue to choose and prefer tangible copies. Even now we can choose to go to iTunes and download new albums or we can go up to our local Kmart and pick up a CD.

You know what? My TV I've had for 20 years works just fine still. I don't think I should throw out a perfectly functional set just so I can drop a few hundred bucks and get a new one.

This is actually an excellent point. If you're perfectly satisfied with your TV and don't feel like throwing it out, don't. When I'm preaching the good word of HD, I don't intend to motivate you to throw away your perfectly good set for nothing. I only intend to motive people to go for HD if they want to, or if they're getting a new TV anyway. You want to wait a few years for prices to drop? That's fine. You want to wait til your current set dies? That's fine. But don't write off HD as not being worth it. Even if you think it's too expensive, the prices are dropping all the time, and deals are a-flowin' every day too. Shop around, keep your ear to the ground, and you'll see. It's a lot better than you think.

...

Ok, I'm glad to get all that off of my chest. If anyone has any questions or comments, I'd love to hear them. Otherwise, general discussion about HD can now commence.

ps if this thread can get any sort of reasonable activity, I'll do my best to keep my HD soapboxing to a minimum outside of this thread.