Epeus' epigone

Edifying exquisite equine entrapments

Sunday, 31 December 2006

HDTV disappointments

I spent a chunk of time looking at HDTVs in Best Buy and the Sony shop yesterday, and wasn't impressed. Overall, what I saw on the displays looked full of compression artefacts, with poor colour. Most of them were 720p displays, with the 1080p ones starting about $4,000. It seem there is some buyer's remorse around too, as customers grapple with upconversion and, no doubt, with HDCP's deliberate degradation. It sounds like Pip Coburn's warning in The Change Function - that flat panel TV's are a no-brainer, but HDTV complexity could mess things up with extra perceived pain of adoption - was more accurate than Mark Cuban's 'HDTV beats the net' rant.

I also had a look round the Apple store yesterday, and saw excellent HD quality on a $2000 HD iMac, and a $999 23" Cinema display (not to mention the $2000 30" display which is way beyond 1080p in size). Where did I get the HD content? Over the net - The Harry Potter 5 trailer and Rocketboom's HD edition. The problem of connecting computers to HD screens is a mess, but it is one of the media industries' own creation, as they insisted on a new connector with DRM in the cables. Another friend of mine is working on some interesting new projection systems that may mean that all the computers will need is a white wall to point at.


Technorati Tags: DRM, HD, HDTV, Live TV is Dead, video

Posted by Kevin Marks at 13:37

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About Me

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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