HDTV disappointments

I spent a chunk of time looking at HDTVs in Best Buy and the Sony shop yesterday, and wasn't impressed. Overall, what I saw on the displays looked full of compression artefacts, with poor colour. Most of them were 720p displays, with the 1080p ones starting about $4,000. It seem there is some buyer's remorse around too, as customers grapple with upconversion and, no doubt, with HDCP's deliberate degradation. It sounds like Pip Coburn's warning in The Change Function - that flat panel TV's are a no-brainer, but HDTV complexity could mess things up with extra perceived pain of adoption - was more accurate than Mark Cuban's 'HDTV beats the net' rant.

I also had a look round the Apple store yesterday, and saw excellent HD quality on a $2000 HD iMac, and a $999 23" Cinema display (not to mention the $2000 30" display which is way beyond 1080p in size). Where did I get the HD content? Over the net - The Harry Potter 5 trailer and Rocketboom's HD edition. The problem of connecting computers to HD screens is a mess, but it is one of the media industries' own creation, as they insisted on a new connector with DRM in the cables. Another friend of mine is working on some interesting new projection systems that may mean that all the computers will need is a white wall to point at.

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