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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BillyG who wrote (45233)	9/23/1999 1:19:00 PM
From: DiViT	Respond to of 50808

From marks Monday Memo: (Cube inside??)... - Department of personal experience IV - Konka's inexpensive HDTV line: I attended the Konka press conference yesterday and saw their equipment sort-of in action. I say "sort of" because no attempt was made to receive DTV off-air or via cable. Instead, the integrated "HDTV" (HD3298U, $3,499) was fed from a Sencore server, and the separate "HDTV-ready" display (HR3293U, $2,499) and decoder (HD-001, $999) were fed from a DVD player. All are to be available in November. The DVD images were stretched to 16:9 from a narrower shooting aspect ratio. The HDTV images exhibited jerky motion sometimes, which I attribute to the server (since it appeared that sections were skipped), but which Konka's engineer was willing to accept blame for in their decoder. Both displays had pincushioning at top and bottom, making the flat screens appear concave. The HDTV also showed a picture-level-related geometric distortion: When the screen faded to black, the top got stretched. Horizontal resolution appeared to be (and was "confirmed" by the engineer to be) around 800 lines (the press release says there is "a native display format of 480p"). There was a video-buzz-like artifact (a sharp, moving, horizontal brightness variation), and the tubes also exhibited non-uniformity of brightness, making them look dirty in bright areas. Contrast ratio on the HD material appeared poor, but that could be the source material (I am not familiar with it). DC restoration, however, was excellent (much better than on other inexpensive "HD" displays). It was said that the 30-inch-diagonal tubes (Konka calls them 32-inch) shown were from Toshiba and the chips from either Philips or STMicroelectronics, leaving one to wonder what, exactly, Konka was contributing. Konka said they had other sources for the tubes, too. Their engineer seemed fascinated by my explanation of differential phosphor luminance decay (the letterbox-stripe burn-in issue) and said they might redesign their circuits as a result. Much may change. The sets shown were only prototypes. They had the wrong color cabinets (and tiny handles, given their roughly 150-lb. weights). The model numbers changed after the brochures were printed. Konka plans to manufacture a whopping 200 HD displays in 1999, "maybe more next year." And this deserved a front-page story in yesterday's Los Angeles Times? FYI, Robert Graves, chair of the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), was at the event and appeared to want Konka to submit receivers to Zenith for evaluation, with a goal of possibly having Konka submit the 8-VSB receivers for testing against COFDM in China -- IF the receivers are good enough.