New Patents for Digital VCR and HDTV Decoder from Goldstar and Hitachi
The New York Times 01/12/98
1) Goldstar: Digital VCR patent 5,682,457
> Goldstar Ltd., the Korean electronics company, has won a patent
for a VCR that can record and playback a digital signal on current
Super-VHS tapes. Goldstar is part of LG Electronics, which also holds a
majority share of Zenith Electronics. In step with Goldstar, Matsushita
Electric Industrial's JVC has also announced plans to introduce a
digital VCR that uses standard-sized tapes. Thus yet another war over
formats may be brewing in the digital television revolution.
> Goldstar's digital VCR uses a cartridge with conventional Super-VHS
magnetic tape. The company says that a VHS tape can record a signal with
a bandwidth of up to 4.4 megahertz; a Super-VHS tape can handle a signal
of up to 7 megahertz.
> Goldstar's engineers -- Sang Joon Woo, Kook Hyun Jang, Tai Suk Yang
and Taik Sang Oh -- manage to squeeze a wide-bandwidth digital
television signal into a narrow-bandwidth Super-VHS tape by dividing the
signal into two channels, inserting timing markers into the split
signals, and then reuniting the signal for playback.
> Goldstar and its team of inventors received patent 5,682,457.
2) Hitachi: HDTV Decoder patent 5,635,985
> Hitachi America Ltd. has received a patent for a decoder that can
translate digital high-definition or digital standard-definition signals
into an analog signal. High definition is a digital signal with greatly
improved picture quality; standard definition is a digital signal with
the same resolution as analog television. Broadcasters are interested in
both signals because they offer singular advantages over analog TV. High
definition offers a great picture, but transmission is so complex it
fills up an entire channel. Standard definition offers an ordinary
picture but leaves enough room in the channel to broadcast more than one
signal.
> Building a decoder that can handle both signals is an expensive
undertaking, one that manufacturers believed would make inexpensive
analog TV's almost as costly as some digital sets. That is because the
vast amount of data in an HDTV signal requires at least 10 megabytes of
computer memory.
> But Hitachi says it has patented a technology that cuts those costs
by maximizing the common circuitry used to down convert both
high-definition and standard-definition pictures.
> The Hitachi decoder accomplishes this by ''preparsing'' and
''downsampling'' -- two terms for reducing the amount of data used to
represent digital pictures. Bytes of data used to represent pixels, the
points of light that make up a video picture, are reduced from eight
bits to five, six or seven.
> Hitachi and the inventors Jill Boyce and Larry Pearlstein received
patent 5,635,985. |
