Samsung's HDTV demo didn't get the CBS signal...................
broadcastingcable.com
Samsung demos DTV strategy
Among new products, LCD standard-definition set may be a sleeper
By Glen Dickson
Samsung Electronics America invited members of the press to its Ridgefield Park, N.J., headquarters last Tuesday for a live demonstration of HDTV. The 1080I video was to be broadcast by experimental station WCBS-HD New York and shown on Samsung's new 55-inch rear projection set.
Unfortunately, no one saw any HDTV on the $7,995 set. That's because of a technical glitch on the part of CBS, according to Samsung. Because WCBS-HD doesn't have its digital studio-to-transmitter link from the CBS Broadcast Center to the Empire State Building working yet, CBS engineers needed to bring over a bitstream recorder to the Empire State Building to feed HDTV video into WCBS-HD's transmitter for the demo. That didn't happen, says Mark Knox, Samsung senior marketing manager. CBS engineers didn't return repeated calls.
Knox was left to show what he could on Samsung's new SVP-555JHD set, which consisted of a DVD movie input and over-the-air reception of NTSC pictures. Since the set upconverts everything to 1080I for display, the DVD material, shown in the 16:9 mode, looked fantastic. Because of the poor over-the-air reception, the NTSC pictures simply looked big and fuzzy. But the new Samsung unit did show its ability to convert 4:3 NTSC pictures to the 16:9 aspect ratio without glaringly distorting them.
More impressive, however, was the 40-inch, 16:9 standard-definition set sitting next to the SVP-555JHD. The set, which currently sells in Korea, used an LCD rear projector to show NTSC pictures in the 480-line progressive mode and produced an excellent picture when fed with the DVD source. The unit will go on sale this October in the U.S. for $2,995.
While it doesn't have Samsung's integrated ATSC receiver/decoder technology, the 40-inch LCD set could be paired with one of the DTV set-tops entering the market (such as Thomson's $700 unit or Panasonic's $1,500 model) to support widescreen SDTV viewing of DTV broadcasts--at a total cost far less than that of Samsung's HDTV set. The 40-inch set also is only 14 inches deep (compared with the 24-inch depth of the SVP-555JHD) and weighs 62 pounds, compared with the 55-inch HDTV set's 164 pounds.
While Samsung doesn't have its own DTV set-top yet, it does plan "set-top solutions down the road," Knox says. In the meantime, the company has put all its energy into the SVP-555JHD, which it will sell through specialty retailers and custom installers; New England Audio is one confirmed dealer.
Samsung has built its own DTV chip sets for the SVP-555JHD that it won't sell on an to other manufacturers until 2000. The set has an integrated ATSC demodulator/decoder, a matching digital signal equalizer to minimize multipath errors, an MPEG-2 decoder that handles all 18 ATSC formats, and a universal format converter that can translate any DTV or NTSC signal to 1080I, 720P or 480P--although in the case of the SVP-555JHD, it converts everything to 1080I.
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