Word: analogies
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...sets to Japanese and European manufacturers, the U.S. was about to lose the market for tomorrow's TVs as well. It seemed only a matter of time before U.S. consumers started replacing their squat, fuzzy receivers with crisp, wide- screen sets built around a made-in-Japan technology called analog HDTV...
Conventional TV uses analog waves as electronic representations -- or analogues -- of the light and sound waves captured by television cameras and microphones. The Japanese approach to HDTV was to double the number of horizontal lines used to reproduce the images on the screen -- from just over 500 to more than 1,000 -- while continuing to rely on analog technology to transmit the images...
Scientists have long known that it is possible to represent the information carried in analog waves with strings of numbers. That is essentially what recording engineers did when they replaced analog records and tapes with digital compact discs. The advantages are twofold. Digital signals offer many more opportunities to identify and eliminate distortions caused by interference -- the echoes, flutters, ghosts and bursts of noise that can make today's broadcast television so hard on the eyes. Going digital also makes it easier to isolate and manipulate images -- freeze frames, enlarge pictures, even view scenes from different angles. That feature will...
Another problem is that the Japanese system is technically outdated. Because it was conceived 20 years ago, it is based on an analog system of transmitting pictures. Researchers in the U.S. and Europe have been moving toward a digital system that can be more easily integrated with computers and other advanced video technology. The unwieldy alliance -- business, government and public-TV broadcasters -- that is bankrolling HDTV in Japan has been slow in reacting to that technological challenge. "It is too late for us to abandon the old analog system," admits a Japanese electronics executive. "The future is digital...
...holds as much music as its full-size cousin, and unlike the traditional CD (if something a decade old can be called traditional), the MD records as well as plays back. True, it does not offer the compact disc's perfection of fidelity, but the digital MD easily outperforms analog tape cassettes. And unlike portable CD units, the MD player doesn't skip when jolted...