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

To: BillyG who wrote (26026)	12/3/1997 9:03:00 AM
From: Brad Rogers	Respond to of 50808

Tuesday December 2, 6:15 pm Eastern Time INTERVIEW - TI plays down chip industry concerns By Kieran Murray DALLAS, Dec 2 (Reuters) - Texas Instruments Inc. [NYSE:TXN - news] said Tuesday it expects the global chip market to show improved growth in 1998 and downplayed concerns over prices for memory chips and end market demand. Vladi Catto, TI's chief economist, said the economic crisis in Asia would help the semiconductor industry in 1998 because South Korean producers will be forced to cut back their plans for capacity expansion. But he said memory chip prices would likely remain under pressure over the next three months before improving. ''My contention is that in the very short run -- by that I probably mean the next two or three months -- we may continue to see downward pressure on memory prices,'' he said. ''But in the intermediate run, which is six to 12 months from now, we are going to see the impact of cutbacks in capacity on the part of Korea and also Japan and Taiwan, all of which is going to benefit the industry.'' Texas Instruments' shares fell about 9 percent on Tuesday after Merrill Lynch cut its earnings estimates for the company, citing slower order rates, excess capacity and a deceleration of demand in the chip industry's end markets. Catto declined to comment on TI's order rates, saying he did not have detailed information at hand, but he expects the industry to do better in 1998 than this year. ''All in all, I think that, as we look at the semiconductor market, we still see growth for the semiconductor market in 1998 stronger than it is in 1997,'' he told Reuters. TI executives said in October that they expected the global chip market to grow 15 percent or more next year, compared with about 10 percent this year. Catto saw no evidence of slowing demand in end markets such as personal computers, wireless and networking. ''I don't see a deceleration in the growth of the end markets,'' he said. The U.S. economy should remain strong in 1998 with European economies doing better than in 1997 and the Asia- Pacific region also growing because of rapid growth in China and because Japan would also do better than in 1997. ''With the economies in 1998 stronger than they were in 1997, we see the (global) end equipment markets in 1998 at least as strong as they were in 1997,'' Catto said. There was some ''misunderstanding'' by investors about the impact of Asia's economic crisis on the semiconductor industry. ''It seems to me the financial markets are interpreting the current situation exactly the wrong way,'' Catto said. South Korean producers -- led by chip industry heavyweight Samsung -- would be forced to cut back investment plans because the country's economic woes were hurting their ability to raise money for expansion. ''The end result of all of this will be heavy cutbacks in Korea's capital spending plans, which in turn will benefit companies like TI simply because they will bring about an equilibrium between demand and supply quicker than anticipated,'' he said. Global oversupply in the last two years has battered the prices of common memory chips, which account for 15-20 percent of TI's revenues. Catto said the weakness of South Korea's national currency would likely put more pressure on memory chip prices in the near-term, but said it would be a, ''very temporary phenomoenon to be quickly reversed by cutbacks in capacity additions by Korean companies.''

To: BillyG who wrote (26026)	12/3/1997 9:34:00 AM
From: J Fieb	Respond to of 50808

A recent Usenet posting where the critical issues of image quality are discussed for PC-DVD....Why you should just hook it up to your TV. Maybe this is why encore only got 3 stars. CUBE can't you fix this VGA disply problem(make a ZiVA for VGA) or do the delacing for them?. People won't know its not the fault of the decoder. Chromac, are these problems surmountable? ww2.altavista.digital.com@49904@alt%2evideo%2edvd%26cinemaster > >> Your not out of luck. ALL the DVD-ROM players perform Line-doubling, > >> whether or not they explicitly advertise it as a 'buzz-word' like > >> CL does. > > > >This isn't exactly true. The cinemaster card doesn't do line doubling. > >It attempts to do de-interlacing by discarcding half the frames, which > >looks like crap compared to real line doubled output. > > > > But each frame (field strictly speaking is what you mean, right?) is > only half the lines of the total picture. does it then just display > each line twice? That seems awfully cheap, but then again... :-) That's what it should do, but do to poorly written and tested software the reality is worse than that. It discards the lines from half of the fields and doesn't make the lines double thickness, so the picture is squashed to half of its height. Worse, when you try to play the blasted thing back at a higher res mode it still uses the same number of scan lines that it does in 640x480 and just stretches the picture even more horizontally. In other words, the software for this card is complete crap. > >> From what I've been able to gather, the Sigma Designs RealMagic Hollywood > >> decoder (available by itself or in a bundle from Sony or Philips) if by > >> far the best best for line-doubled video out to a Data Projector. It > >> is univerally accepted as the best VGA display (the Hi-Val kit apparently > >> has some glaring problems on the VGA display, as do the CL board, although > >> both of them seem to do well out the s-video port). the Hollywood board > >> can thoeretically X-Y interpolate up to 1280x1024, whic is almost line > >> quadrupling! > >> > >> Give it a try, I think you'll be pleased. > > > >I've looked at this card once. My understanding is that it doesn't do > >AC3 output, which is something I need for my planned application. Do you > >know if they are going to address this shortcomming? > > > > See my other post. Basically, there is an internal plug on the card that > has SP/DIF out on it. but they didnt (for whatever reason) include an > extra plug ont he card, so you'll need to buy a backplane metal piece > with a wire to connect to the card. Cheap if you can find one. Thanks for the info. This won't be problem for me. > >Also have you actually seen the picture from the hollywood card? I'm > >curious how well it handles the issue of scalling artifacts. The Dxr2 > >card only provides decent looking line doubling at 640x480. At other > >resolutions you can see scaling artifacts similar to the scaling > >artifacts that I encounter in the more mediocre designed video processors > >in LCD data grade projectors. > > > > When I was at comdex this year I saw the CL Encore, the Hollywood, and > the Hi-Val, and I think one other, and the Hollywood was far and away > the best. all the others looked washed out, the CL Encore just plain looked > bad, and the Hollywood had an abundance of controls to adjust the picture > quality (things like gamma control and color temp, etc). > > Also, all reviews of the Hollywood (or the current bunch of DVD-ROM's) > have all said the VGA performance of the Hollywood card (as opposed to > s-vide or comp, which doesnt interest me) is superior to all other cards > out right now. Most reviews have also pointed to the poor chroma-keying > as being the main reason most other packages are poor (much like you > have surmised). I owned the Creative Dxr2 for a month and I've been playing with this Cinemaster card. I'm basically going to keep going through these cards until I find one that meets my needs. I plan to use this with the graphics grade CRT projector that I'll be buying for Christmas. > The Hollywood has a built-in scaler from 16x16 to 1280x1024. I'm not sure > if this necessarily implies it is superior, but I would say it does. > also Sigma Designs has been doing MPEG boards for a long time, much longer > than the other companies with DVD-ROM offerings............. CUBE say it isn't true. Is the above true, the Sigma Designs board is the best PC-DVD sol.? How come you are doing as well as you are on PC-DVD? Any comments out there? Maybe my first player will be a CE model. Anyone have a good link for learning the differences between TV and PC screens? If ZiVA is specialized for CE and TV graphics where design wins have been slow to materialize. Is there any chance that ZiVA2 could split into 2 types, one for TVs and one for PCs. Just worried that maybe the video quality isn't good with PC-DVD and ZiVA. ha