Today
we've decided to take a little walk down Home Theater memory lane. The
last couple years have seen some significant changes in home theater
technology, and we've seen a few devices go extinct. A few are still
on the endangered species list, but will probably be gone very soon.
We'd like to bid farewell to some technological advances that changed
the way we enjoy entertainment in our homes, or were supposed to, but
maybe it didn't quite pan out.
Looking Back on Home Theater
CRT Televisions
The
Home Theater revolution really began in 1946 after the end of World War
II. During the war, manufacture of televisions was halted, but when
that restriction was lifted, the technology came into its own. Of
course those early CRTs were nothing like the ones that recently
disappeared from store shelves, but they ushered in the era of in-home
entertainment. The earliest production sets sold hit the market even
before the war. In 1938 a 3-inch CRT television cost $125 US, the
equivalent of $1863 in 2007 dollars. The luxury 12-inch model cost
$445 US, or $6633 in 2007. While the adjusted-for-inflation prices
haven't changed that much over the years, the definition of family time
has been forever altered. Most of us have fond memories of sitting
around the TV with our parents, brothers and sisters enjoying a prime
time show.
In 1946 only 0.5% of U.S.
households had a television set, by 1954 55.7% had one, and that number
hit 90% as early as 1962. Meanwhile, in 1947 in Britain, there were
15,000 households with a TV, that number climbed to 1.4 million in
1952, and shot up to 15.1 million by 1968. In recent years the trusted
CRT television has been replaced by digital microdisplay technology
like DLP and LCD, and newer, sexier flat panel technologies like flat
LCD and plasma. In 2007 LCD televisions surpassed CRT televisions in
total global sales, hitting 47% - pushing CRT down to 46%. And in 2007
Best Buy, one of the largest television retailers in the US, announced
that they would no longer carry any analog TV sets. While they still
sell a few digital CRTs, were quickly seeing the good old CRT become
part of the good old days.
VCR
Nothing
enabled Home Movie entertainment more then the advent of the VCR.
Before the mass market success of the Video Cassette Recorder in the
early 1980s, we were all slaves to the television programming
schedule. You had to be home to watch something when it was on, or
you'd miss it, and probably never see it again. Forget the idea of
sitting down to a movie with friends and family. The VCR also gave us
the first real home theater format war, pitting Sony's Betamax format
against JVC's VHS format. By most accounts Beta was a superior format,
but VHS stole the hearts and minds of the consumer and won the war due,
in part, to its longer recording times. You could fit a two hour movie
on one VHS tape, but the one hour limit on a Betmax tape (until the
release of Beta II and Beta III) hurt its adoption.
With
the VCR came video rental stores, and with that came a whole new
revolution of in-home movie viewing, otherwise known as the home
theater. The stores popped up on every corner and in every strip mall
you could find. And the phenomenon exploded. Blockbuster took over
for most of the smaller, mom and pop style rental stores and became a
huge player in home theater. Lately online video rental like NetFlix
and downloadable movie services like Vudu have threatened to destroy
Blockbuster's business model, but it's still way too early to put brick
and mortar movie rental on the endangered list. Although VHS rental is
entirely gone, having been replaced by DVD for some time. It took a
decade, but DVD overtook VHS in 2003 and hasn't looked back. On the
recording side, DVRs have begun to displace VHS as the technology of
choice to record television programming. It is estimated that one in
five US households has at least one DVR, with that number set to reach
50% by 2011.
Laserdisc
Laserdisc
was going to usher in a new era of home theater quality with an
experience unlike any other. Technologically superior to VHS for both
audio and video, it was the first optical media format to make it to
consumers. On the video side, the format supported 425 lines of
resolution, compared with the 240 on a VHS tape. The discs also
supported digital audio like Dolby Digital and DTS, the same formats we
find on DVD discs today. However, while it provided superior quality,
it also had a few shortcomings and never really caught on with
consumers. First of all, the discs were huge, measuring almost a full
foot (30 cm) in diameter and were quite heavy. This size made them
difficult to deal with, easy to damage and required more powerful (in
other words louder) equipment to spin them. In addition, each disc
only held 30 to 60 minutes of video per side, requiring consumers to
flip the disc to see both halves of a movie. If a movie was too big to
fit on two sides of one disc, they'd have to swap in a second disc as
well.
In 1998, it was estimated that
laserdisc player had a market penetration of approximately two million
US households or about 2%. That number never really increased, and the
technology was eventually completely displaced by DVD.
DVI
We
know we're sure to get email on this one, but as a home theater format,
DVI or Digital Video Interface cables have all but been replaced by
HDMI. In the early days of HDTV, DVI was hailed as the best option for
video cabling. It provided the only digital connection between your
HDTV source, like an ATSC tuner or a set-top box, and your display. As
HDMI crept into the picture, DVI began to lose its luster. HDMI, or
High Definition Multimedia Interface, carried the equivalent video
information, but also bundled digital surround sound audio on the same
cable. Since those early days of HDMI 1.0 and 1.1, version 1.3 of the
HDMI spec has been released, surpassing the video capabilities of the
original DVI cable. Still alive and kicking in the IT space, DVI has
seen its days of glory as the go-to cable for HDTV fade into the
sunset. There are rumors that DisplayPort may begin to push DVI out of
the PC/IT market as well. Farewell DVI, it was fun while it lasted.
SED
We first talked about SED in May of 2005, on
Episode #7.
Surface-conduction Emission Display - SED works very much like
traditional CRT technology, shooting a beam of electrons to excite
phosphors on a screen. Unlike, CRTs, though SED uses a thin strip of
Palladium Oxide as an electron emitter, instead of a huge cathode ray
tube. This allows the whole display system to be manufactured as thin
as 10 millimeters thick.
We believed back in 2005 that SED had a chance to replace plasma and
flat LCD as the dominant flat panel display technology. In subsequent
years at shows like CES we even saw amazing demos from the two main
companies behind the technology, Canon and Toshiba. Legal issues over
patent infringement hurt SED, as did the time it took to get to
market. In that time plasma and LCD worked out the kinks, improved
efficiency in manufacturing and economies of scale and greatly
increased the barrier to entry in the flat panel display market. It's
rumored that Canon is still working on SED displays. But at this
point, it looks like SED will go the way of the Dodo.
Researched at wikipedia.org and several other Internet sites.
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