By Jon Peddie

CES was awash in HD. Everyone had some—to not have HD at CES was almost cause for non-admittance. Ah, but there’s HD and then there’s not HD, and lots of stuff called HD that isn’t. And during the conference I found myself being confused and wondering how in the hell the consumers, clearly not as smart or personable as I, am could ever figure it out.

When you say or hear the term HD, it conjures up brilliant images of multi-colored birds, stunning footage of American football games, and bone-rattling scenes from Return of the King. And that’s as it should be—there should be a clear (no pun) idea, and a definition of what HD is, what it means.

Alas, we’re still in the snake-oil stage of HD and the PC and CE carpetbaggers are pawning off on the unsuspecting public things that are either near HD, not HD, or special conditions of HD. All the rest of the upstanding suppliers are offering what I’d call true HD, but in a crowd of babble it's damn difficult to sort them out.

You need three things to have HD: a source, a delivery mechanism, and a display device. The source (today) is typically satellite, cable, or terrestrial, free, over the air. The delivery mechanism is one of the confusing elements. It could be a PC, it could be a TV, and it could be some specialized system. The display device is something that can faithfully display, in a native mode, an honest 1920 x 1080–resolution screen (2.07 Mpixels).

Now let’s talk about a few of the things that are not HD. On the delivery side there are no commercially available HD DVDs. There are several prototypes of such things using various compression techniques and media, but you can not go out and buy a HD DVD today, nor will you be able to for some time. There are no DVD HD players; prototypes, yes, engineering examples, yes—products, no. There are a few true HD displays. A 1440 x 1080 or 1280 x 768 display is not a HD display; a 1366 x 768 screen is not a HD display. A scaled image is not a true HD image.

A PC is not a CE device, although the Media Center PC is beginning to look like one and in some cases behave like a CE device. Still, it isn’t one; it’s a PC with a non-real-time OS that still makes wild excursions into nonexistent memory locations, and that requires unexpected resting.

A lot of panel suppliers were showing what they called an HD display, and in fact they looked damn good. Perhaps I’m being a little pedantic to slur them and say they are not “true HD” just because they are a few five hundred thousand pixels short of HD when they have such great scaling.

So, take a PC, playing a standard 4.7-GByte DVD that has had HD content encoded in WM9 or DivX and displayed on a PC screen of 1280 x 1024—is it HD? The answer is yes, as a function of your willingness to compromise. The compromising places are the content that was encoded—so far no major studio is producing or sanctioning the production of any feature films. The display is a compromise, albeit maybe an acceptable one, and then there is the location of the screen, that old lean forward vs. lean backward argument. Would these compromises be acceptable in an environment that wasn’t your home, like an airplane? Most definitely. Is it that much different than a dedicated CE device like a portable DVD player on an airplane, train, or the backseat of a car?

If you had a PC in your entertainment center driving a HD, or near-HD display (TV, projector, panel, etc.), and if the PC had a WM9 or DviX decoder and you had some content that was so encoded, is that an HD situation? Maybe for you, or for me, but not for my neighbor, aunt, or daughter. And the other problem is where do you get content?

How about if you had a DviX-enabled DVD player (e.g., Kiss DP-450) and a real or near-HD display—is that a HD situation? Yes … but. The trick is still getting content.

What about a DVD with anamorphic wide screen? Is that HD? No, of course not—that’s an insult to your eyes and brain.

And as mentioned, if you have a HD RF source (cable, satellite, and/or terrestrial), delivery system (tuner, STB), and a display, that is a HD situation.

At CES, among the many HD presentations, Microsoft was giving out WM9-encoded standard-size 4.7-GByte DVDs with snippets of HD content. They can be played on any PC with WM9 and an adequate display. Is that an HD experience? No. That’s a HD experiment, a proof of concept. It is not a CE device; it’s not something you can take home and use. There’s no content available; you can’t call up BlockBuster or NetFlix and order a HD DVD and watch it.

But CES is not just a showroom of CE products. It is a conference that shows off future technology and possibilities, and it lived up to its mission and promise this year. It’s just that what used to be a nice, solid black line between CE devices that were or very soon would be available as products and laboratory and development systems has been grayed out by the marketeers trying to win mindshare with the press and visitors.

 

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