Hdtv Schedule

HDTVs aren't cheap...yet. But 2004 may be remembered as the year when they got a whole lot more affordable. During the 2003 holiday buying season, HDTVs were the hot buy, and 2004 looks to be another big year for the growth of the HDTV installed base.

This year saw many new players jump into the game. HDTV is a hot product category and is very commoditized with original device manufacturers (ODMs) making the actual sets. "All you need is a checkbook and a plane ticket to China, and you're in the HDTV business," said one industry type about this year's many new entrants.

So today we take a look back at 2004 and the events that shaped the HDTV business.

Newsletters from display industry analysts such as Insight Media and DisplaySearch reported on the current worldwide surplus of LCD panels. This abundance of LCD glass has helped drive LCD-based HDTVs down the price curve faster, although industry observers have cited a possible shortage of other needed components, such as backlights. As an example of how far down in price LCDs have come, The Syntax Groups' Olevia 30" LCD HDTV delivered good performance in our review, especially for its $1,700 price-point. Recently, that unit has dropped even more, and can be found for under $1,500.

Sharp has carved out one of the top spots in the LCD arena, with its Aquos line of panels delivering some of the best performance we've seen yet from LCD HDTVs. Sharp's 37" LC-37G4U Aquos was the most impressive LCD panel we saw come through our lab in 2004.

LCD panels are known for their brightness and vivid color, and the longstanding knocks against the technology are poor black-level performance and some "streaking" due to slow panel response times. But another area where LCD panels have led the charge is in pushing panel resolutions up to 1920x1080 to deliver 1080p content natively. Samsung's 46" LT-P468W holds bragging rights as the largest shipping LCD TV panel, although LG announced a 55-inch model that's slated to ship sometime next year. Still, Samsung's 46" was one of the first to have a native panel resolution of 1920x1080. The result of this support is that 1080i images require only de-interlacing, although 720p images must be scaled up. However in Samsung's case, 720p test images and HDTV content looked very good, as did DVD movie content (852x480).

Plasma display panels (PDPs) have held prestige among home theater aficionados for several years, despite past issues with static image burn-in and short life spans, mostly due to its slender form factor. In the past year, PDPs have begun to deliver excellent color balance and impressive black levels, although insufficient brightness is often an issue for PDPs, particularly when compared to LCD-based panels. On the plus side, plasma panels maintain image quality and color fidelity at relatively sharp viewing angles.

Another issue we've seen persist this year with PDPs, particularly 42" and smaller panels, is that many of them don't offer true HD resolution. EDTV models support a native resolution of 852x480, and some "HD" models support a native pixel resolution of 1024x768 or 1024x1024 (using non-square pixels to create a 16:9 aspect-ratio display). It has been industry practice to state that these panels support an HD resolution, but this is at best a half-truth.

Display companies will affirm that because a panel has more than 720 scan-lines of resolution, it is therefore an HD device. This hearkens back to the era of analog TV and CRTs, where the number of scan lines defined the resolution. However, this statement ignores the horizontal resolution parameter, which is only 1024, which is not enough to provide a 1:1 pixel mapping of the 1280 pixels found in a 720p HDTV image. Digital television, unlike NTSC, defines the resolution in pixels, both horizontally and vertically. 50-inch PDPs usually have native pixel resolutions of 1366x768 or 1280x768, both of which have more than enough pixels to provide a 1:1 pixel mapping of 720p.

2004 saw a downward price movement in the PDP space, but true HD-resolution panels remain at $4,000 or more. We also saw a number of new entrants into the plasma game, with big PC makers like Dell being one of the more noteworthy. The company has introduced two 42" PDPs, a $2,300 EDTV resolution model, and a $3,500 "HD" model with a native pixel resolution of 1024x768. Dell is using Samsung glass and PixelWorks video processors, and both displays gave a good first impression, though we have yet to put either through our review wringer.

This year, the most gorgeous display we tested—and we shed a tear when we had to pack it up to send it home—was Pioneer's PureVision 50" PRO-1110HD with its combination of superb color balance, contrast ratio, and overall video processing.

Some analysts believed that when Intel ramped its LCoS chip business this holiday season, PDP and LCD makers would lose ground as Intel flooded the market with affordable "good enough" LCoS chips for rear-projection TVs (RPTVs). But that tsunami never touched the HDTV market's shores, and the main market drivers remain LCD panels and RPTVs based on three micro-display technologies: LCD, DLP and LCoS.

Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) seems like it would be a logical marriage for a company that has plenty of spare manufacturing capacity, like say, Intel. The company looked at some of its now-aging fab lines that could no longer produce cutting-edge CPUs. The strategy was that making LCoS chips for the booming HDTV business would be a profitable new application for fab lines that would otherwise be producing lesser-earning processors. On paper, it all looked great. There was just the minor matter of actually producing the LCoS chips and getting sufficient yields to turn this into a profitable venture. Despite ongoing attempts, the CPU giant repeatedly ran into setbacks and yield problems, and Intel ultimately scrapped its ambitions to be a player in the display business. More surprising news was that Philips, a big-time player in the LCD panel business through its partnership with LG, also closed up its LCoS manufacturing facility in Europe.

The remaining players in the LCoS business are Sony with its SXRD light engine, and JVC with its D-ILA technology. We haven't tested a Sony SXRD-based RPTV yet, though we did review JVC's 61" HD-61Z575 HDTV for PC Magazine, and it wasn't very impressive. This surprised us because we've seen JVC's professional line of front projectors based on D-ILA light engines, which showed much more impressive picture quality and video processing. It may be a case of something 'lost in translation' to an RPTV implementation, but we hope that JVC will find a way to leverage more of its front-projectors' image quality in its next RPTV-based offering.

Sony's 70-inch KDS70XBR100 SXRD rear projector is slated to ship in early 2005. With a native resolution of 1920x1080, it holds great promise, but the LCoS market is littered with the remains of others who had great promise. Assuming Sony meets its schedule, we'll work on getting a review unit in.

The best price/performance value on today's HDTV market takes the form of rear-projection TVs (RPTVs). With solid-performing 50" units on the market for $2,600, and some newer offerings making their way toward $2,000, RPTVs are a great way to get in the HDTV action without needing to take out a second mortgage.

Part of what makes the RPTV market so interesting is that it's driven by three different underlying technologies: TI's DLP, High Temperature Poly-Silicon (HTPS) LCD, and LCoS. In fact, companies like InFocus have designed a chassis that is micro-display "agnostic." InFocus builds the chassis, shops the light engine market to find the best price/performance characteristics, and then implements it. Then on the next design cycle, if something better is available, the company can opt for that solution.

Of the RPTVs we reviewed this year, the standout was Samsung's 50" HL-P5063W. With a street price of around $2,600, this unit delivers big-picture performance without a big-wallop price tag. Granted, $2,600 is not exactly chump change, but as HDTV offerings go in today's market, this is still a good value for what you're getting.

Sticking to its aspiration to be the low-cost leader, Syntax Group has just brought out a new 50" LCoS-based RPTV at a price of $2,100. We'll be reviewing this one on ExtremeTech in the coming weeks, and while our initial impression is pretty favorable, we need to put this one on the bench and get some measurements taken before we can say anything definitive.

Microprojection RPTVs are also undergoing interesting innovation in the area of form factors. Infocus and Thomson/RCA have jointly developed a rear projection TV that's less than seven inches thick. We mentioned Sony's SXRD LCoS rear projector, but Sony has also been the leader in offering RPTVs using polysilicon LCD panels. Meanwhile, Sharp announced it was shipping polysilicon panels offering a 1920x1080 pixel resolution. However, we still haven't seen 1080p DLP units actually ship, despite much hoopla at the 2004 Consumer Electronics Show.

CRT televisions still offer the best value in HDTVs today. You can find 26- and 30-inch (diagonal) direct-view units for well under $1,000, while some 42-inch rear projection TVs are discounted to under $1,000. Even large, premium CRT rear projectors can be found for under $3,000, with all the image quality bells and whistles that give CRT televisions a loyal following.

However, most of the major manufacturers are scaling back their CRT plans, particularly RPTVs. So it's very likely that large screen displays will gradually migrate to the more slender plasmas and microdisplay rear projection units over time.

Technological innovation is still proceeding on the direct view front. Samsung and others are working on building very thin direct view CRTs that are less than 15 inches deep. Expect those to arrive on the scene some time in 2005.

Connect Me As digital television evolves, so does the technology to connect digital TVs. Until recently, all the connections have been primarily analog in nature. Component video has been the connectors of choice for high-bandwidth HDTV connections. The problem with component video is that two conversion steps are needed for HDTV. First, the digital TV signal needs to be converted at the source to analog. Then the analog signal needs to be converted back to digital at the destination, if you're target display is digital.

The industry has been migrating to digital connections, though that pace has been slowed by content protection concerns raised by the television and movie industries. Fear of unfettered copying of digital content has raised the paranoia of the studios to unheard-of heights.

The primary digital connection in use today for digital displays is DVI, which is a display-only connector. However, FireWire (1394a or iLink) has garnered a number of design wins as a digital stream transport, including suppliers of premium hardware such as Mitsubishi, Denon and Pioneer. Both FireWire and DVI in consumer set-top boxes, DVD players, and digital TVs are enabled for content protection.

However, both FireWire and DVI are likely to be supplanted by HDMI. HDMI is a serial digital interface which can carry both digital video and audio streams, but the video portion is backwards compatible with DVI. All devices that use HDMI must undergo a rigorous certification process to avoid some of the DVI compatibility issues we've seen in the past.

HDTV content certainly got more plentiful in 2004, with services like VOOM bolstering their HD line-ups, and more local network affiliates bringing over-the-air (OTA) HD transmitters online. ATI finally shipped its HDTV Wonder, which has had its fair share of teething pain as its drivers ripen. In particular, the HDTV Wonder's early drivers gave users serious installation problems, some of which were corrected in a subsequent driver release. It's the least expensive among HDTV tuner cards currently, and when used with specific drivers, is certified to run on Windows Media Center Edition 2005.

One ongoing problem (or motivation to build your own HD-DVR) is the cost of set-top HD-DVRs from content providers. Currently there are only two on the market, one from Dish Network, and the other from DirectTV. Both units initially cost around $1,000, which means that unless you're willing to fork out that kind of dough, you have to watch your HDTV the old-fashioned way—in real time. However, Dish Networks recently reduced the price of the DVR-921 to $549, which makes it a lot more interesting.

DVR gives you the freedom to watch what you want when you want. This has been a gating factor to making the move to HDTV cable/satellite service. And this will remain the case until these content provider-supplied HD-DVRs begin to make their way down the price curve.

In Part Two of our State of the Industry: HDTV, we'll peer into our crystal-ball to see what 2005 has in store for us. Hot topics include front projectors, which could be this industry's sleeping giant.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in ExtremeTech.

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