Word: hdtv
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...that scene isn't with us yet, it's feeling eerily close. Standards for room-to-room PC networking and the conversant appliance continue to creep toward the mainstream (and each other). Madison Avenue's trumpets blare for bold (and still overpriced) idiot-box breakthroughs like high-definition television (HDTV) and $15,000 gas-plasma sets that cling to the wall like framed art. Still, 1998 was a year for improvements...
...many cases, however, that will amount to only a few hours of HDTV programming a day, and "high definition" will not be equally high. Some programs will be broadcast at 480 lines of resolution (compared with 330 or so on conventional televisions), others at a sharper 720 lines, and still others at the maximum of 1,080. NBC says it plans to start by offering 480-line quality for daytime programming and 1,080 for some prime-time shows and specials, such as the Olympics and the broadcast premiere of Titanic...
...should everybody rush out to buy one? Well...maybe not. HDTV's obvious advantages over conventional sets are offset by significant disadvantages. For openers, there's the price tag. Sony's smallish set, with a 34-in.-diagonal screen, lists for a largish $8,999. RCA's 55-in. projection-screen set goes for $6,999. Panasonic's 56-in. projection model might appear to be a bargain at $5,999, but it can pick up only nondigital broadcasts--unless you buy the optional $1,700 digital decoder. Prices will eventually drop, of course, but Bill Mannion, general manager...
...cable-TV customers--a full two-thirds of American households--may get a sinking feeling of another sort if they try to tune in. Cable companies are refusing, for now, to carry broadcasters' HDTV signals, saying information-rich HDTV channels overtax their systems and will force some existing cable channels off the dial. Viewers who want decent reception, therefore, will have to buy clunky, old-fashioned TV antennas if they plan to pull in digital broadcasts. Both sides hope to resolve the matter, but for the foreseeable future, "there will be a lot of finger pointing going on," says Torie...
...HDTV signals come in different types as well--different levels of resolution and different techniques of electronically "painting" images on the screen (the most common are known, for reasons most consumers needn't worry about, as "interlaced" and "progressive"). But all the sets that will be hitting the market in the next few months can decode all the available signals...