As American television broadcasts switch from analog to digital, some people are reporting reception problems where they can no longer receive broadcasts from weaker television stations. At the time of this writing, about one-third of the 1,800 television broadcast stations have already made the switch to digital transmissions in advance of the new June 12, 2009 deadline.
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Most Americans should be aware that DTV Day, or the day almost all USA television broadcasters turn off their old analog transmissions and switch to the new digital signals, has been delayed until June 12. But about a third of the approximately 1,800 television stations have already made the switch to digital.
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There were some very hopeful 3D home theater technology demonstrations at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. I only had one day at the show and there were 2700 exhibitors. Fortunately, there were only a few areas that I needed to focus on and home theater 3D technology was one of them.
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Liquid crystal shutter technology has been around for several years, but until recently was pretty much limited to CRT televisions due to high refresh rate requirements that could not be achieved with most LCD or plasma HDTVs. Today, both plasma and LCD televisions are available with high refresh rates, so the time is right for 3D home theater technology to play a much larger role in the consumer market.
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There is no question that Sony’s Blu-ray high definition DVD won the format wars. But at the time when Toshiba decided to drop out of the fight and killed its HD DVD format, Blu-ray features were still in their infancy and did not add very much in the way of features beyond simple higher definition. The Blu-ray standard has evolved since then and both discs and players have added new features.
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3D movies have recently seen a resurgence in the movie theater. Due to new 3D theater technologies, several 3D version of movies have hit the theaters and a few of those have made it to home theater formats in both standard DVD and Blu-ray.
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After winning the war for the dominant high definition format against Toshiba’s HD DVD format in February of 2008, many pundits expected Blu-ray players to take off like a rocket. After all, many had said that the main reasons for poor high definition player sales were uncertainty regarding which format, HD DVD or Blu-ray, would dominate in the long term. Also, high definition player prices were too high. Player prices needed to come down before sales would take off. The “experts” were wrong on both of these claims.
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When selecting the right HDTV for your home theater, it is important to understand the relationship between film frame rates and screen refresh rates. There is an interaction between the two that plays an important role in the quality of the video displayed on your HDTV.
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Blu-ray technology clearly won the battle for high definition DVD movie dominance. But Blu-ray technology continues to evolve, and as it does, new issues pop up. Once recent problem is the “incompatible disc” error that is becoming more common with the Sharp’s very popular BD-HP20U Blu-ray player.
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Even though Toshiba’s HD-DVD format lost the competition in the high definition DVD wars, it is still in the game with the VD-E500 upconverting DVD player, which should ship to merchants before the end of August.
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