100 days will flip HDTV dial
Richard Doherty
395 Words
2760 Characters
01/12/98
Electronic Engineering Times
53
Copyright 1998 CMP Publications Inc.
All eyes are on Las Vegas for the next 100 days. Earlier this month,
the world's first gathering of manufacturers of HDTV sets wowed the
audience at the Consumer Electronics Show. Last week, at the Las Vegas
Hilton, the IEEE/CEMA Digital Engineering Conference mulled technologies
that will empower the transitions from analog to digital and HD
reception. Then, 100 days from now, the National Association of
Broadcasters Conference will convene here to show just how ready
broadcasters are to supply transmitters and content.
Vendors stand ready to deliver what the industry hopes will be
millions of HDTV sets, tens of millions of decoders and possibly as many
PC subsystems over the next five years. Chip makers must determine how
much effort to direct toward MPEG-2 decoding for progressive and/or
interlaced formats. Intel's recent acknowledgement that broadcasters
need to start with interlaced has healed wounds and made industry more
receptive to the message of PC makers, who still believe they can
deliver more eyeballs than consumer companies alone.
The cost to upgrade just a few cameras, switchers, editing suites and
tape decks to HDTV varies widely. But broadcasters might well feel that
a quasi-HDTV signal is good enough. While that would seem to sound a
sour note for makers of true HD-resolution broadcast equipment, don't
count them out. Audience demand for HD-quality programming may give
broadcasters (and cable providers) the jump-start they need to purchase
sufficient HD equipment.
Film already provides a source of HD-resolution material, yet there
are barely enough HDTV telecines to convert existing film stock. Warner
is already shooting its hit show ER in 16:9 format with HD-film
quality. Ditto for Seinfeld and other hit shows, so sure are studios
that HD demand will arise in the future.
Most TV stations can already transmit video at higher resolution than
analog transmitters can handle. In fact, most studio, sports and
news-crew cameras deliver twice the native resolution NTSC can handle.
Thus, there's new interest in digitally bumping up this imagery to
* synthesize HDTV sources. Faroudja Labs (and partner S3), Snell & Wilcox
and Iterated Systems fractal-image enhancement appear to be the new
favorites here.
The next 100 days in Las Vegas will likely set the ramp for the next
100 weeks and 100 months of digital broadcasting.
-Richard Doherty (rdoherty@envisioneering.net) directs digital
technologies testing and market research at the Envisioneering Group in
Seaford, N.Y.
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