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The HDTV and Home Theater Podcast
Your weekly audio HDTV buying guide.
Make informed decisions.
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All the HDTV and Home Theater news and information you need, without all the reading.
Listener Comment Line: 1-949-528-6747
News: WirelessHD Standard Coming in Spring 2007
Other:
Ever wonder how Blu-ray HD DVD discs are made?
Today we cover a new sensation that will be sweeping the home theater world in about ten years, Ultra High Definition. We also cover round two in the "are you getting all the resolution you deserve" debate.
Ultra High Definition Video
OK, you've listened to our podcast and now you feel you understand this wonderful technology we call High Definition. You know the difference between 720 and 1080p. You can even teach the guy at the big box retailer a few things about the subject. So what's next. How about Ultra High Definition Video or UHDV. UHV is a video format, introduced in 2003, that is still in the proposal stage and is being sponsored by NHK of Japan. How much better than HD is UHD? NHK researcher Dr. Kohji Mitani's development team captured three-minutes of video by attaching the camera to the front of a car and drove it around local streets. The footage was displayed on a 12X21 foot wide-angle screen. According to Mitani, there were "gasps of astonishment". Some people even experienced nausea because of the realistic visual effect of speed without the usual physical sensation of movement.
Some cool facts about UHDV
- It takes 194 GB of data for one minute of uncompressed video
- At a data rate of 30Mbps it takes 3 GB for minute of video
- It would take an 8 layer Blu Ray disc to store 66 minutes 30Mbps video
- Resolution: 7,680 x 4,320 pixels (16:9) (approximately 33 megapixels) 16 times current 1080p HDTV
- Frame rate: 60 frame/s.
- Audio: 22.2 channels
- 9 - above ear level
- 10 - ear level
- 3 - below ear level
- 2 - low frequency effects
- Bandwidth: 21 GHz frequency band
- 600 MHz, 500~6600 Mbit/s bandwidth
Bobbing and Weaving, Part Two
Earlier this your we talked about an article written by Gary Merson called " Are you getting all the HDTV resolution you deserve." In the article he described how he had tested 54 2005 model year HDTVs to see how the deinterlaced 1080i content. The result has that roughly half of the TVs used a method he referred to as bobbing, while the others used a method called weaving. He pointed out that as much as 50% of your horizontal resolution could be lost if your TV deinterlaces with the bobbing method and he marked them as 'failed' in his test. This stirred up quite a bit of controversy in the industry.
Mr. Merson is at it again with an update to his article, this time looking at 61 2006 mode year TVs. The result, again roughly 50/50. His test sample seems like a mish-mash of different sets from 16 different manufacturers. It's tough to say whether or not his sample accurately represents all of the hundreds of HDTVs on the market, but it's all we've got to work with. The results were a little surprising. When you consider the uproar we heard when the first article came out, you'd have thought the percentages would be better, but they're still right around fifty percent. The strange thing is that different sets from the same manufacturer could have different results.
- All the sets tested from Fujitsu (2), Hitachi (1), HP (3), JVC (1), Mitsubishi (2), Pioneer (2) and Polaroid (1) passed the test.
- All the sets from Insignia (1), LG (4), Maxent (1) and Philips (4) failed the test.
- Panasonic plasma (3) passed but LCD (1) failed.
- Samsung (12) was all over the board, with LCDs and DLPs that both passed and failed and a couple failed plasmas.
- Sharp (9) had LCDs that both passed and failed and a DLP projector that failed.
- Sony (11) Had LCDs that both passed and failed, all rear projection LCD failed, all rear projection LCoS passed and an LCD projector that passed.
- Toshiba's (4) LCD and DLP passed, but their plasmas failed.
Mr. Merson also added a 3:2 conversion test for this new round, to see if the conversion from 24 fps to 60 fps was preserving all of the possible resolution. Since only 20% of the TVs tested actually passed the test, we don't really think it's worth discussing. There are certainly tests we could all devise to make every TV on the market look like a failure, but what's the point? Remember math class? If only 20% of the students passed the test, something was definitely wrong. For completeness, the sets that passed the 3:2 test were the 2 Fujitsu plasmas, the JVC LCoS, 2 Pioneer plasmas, the Polaroid LCD, one Sharp LCD and 5 Sony LCDs.
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