A friend of mine is looking to dive into the HD movie realm and has asked whether going with 4K is a good way to “future-proof” his collection. It’s a good question, and one that’s being asked by many high-def connoisseurs at the moment. If 4K is here to stay, then won’t any Blu-ray movies bought today soon be obsolete once the inevitable 4K version is released? And are the benefits of “Ultra HD,” if any, worth the hassle of upgrading our systems and devices?

Future-proofing is frustratingly difficult to achieve in practice, as we really never know what’s coming down the pipeline and whether it will stick around once it arrives. 3D, after all, made a big splash but proved to be little more than a fad, and the industry quickly moved away from it due to lackluster demand. The market needed to provide a reason for consumers to upgrade all those 1080p sets, however. Hence the arrival of 4K — the latest in the consumer entertainment space.

If you want the tl;dr version, with a few important exceptions that involve controlled conditions replete with the requisite hardware and software, 4K is mostly hype, for reasons that are well known among tech junkies. That said, if you don’t already have an HD set or are in the market for a new TV, they may be your best option at this point. Let’s explore what 4K is and what it has to offer.

More Pixel, Less Payoff

4K as a resolution has actually been around for more than a decade in the form of digital projection in theaters. As part of the industry’s cost-cutting changeover to digital playback, it was adopted as a cinema standard by Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) in 2005. It has since slowly seeped into the consumer space, with Blu-ray modifying their spec in 2015 to accommodate the format, and YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo and other streaming platforms following suit. 4K’s Blu-ray application, known as Ultra HD (or UHD), is very new, with the first titles being released in Q1 of this year.

No doubt you’ve heard the marketing line that 4K offers “four times the detail of 1080p.” While true in terms of pure pixel count, it’s far from the whole story. When considering 4K, we have to keep in mind the limitations of human visual acuity. The leap in fidelity from standard-definition (480p) to HD (720/1080i/p) is rather more massive than the jump from 1080p to 4K (2160p). Despite the huge uptick in pixels, our sensory threshold compromises our ability to truly capitalize on the pixel gain, barring abnormally close distances or absurdly large screens. As Wiki puts it, “At normal direct-view panel size and viewing distances, the extra pixels of 4K are redundant at the ability of normal human vision.”

Put another way, almost anyone can instantly tell the difference between SD and HD regardless of screen size, but when it comes to 1080p vs. 4K, screen size and viewing distance matter a heck of a lot more. You can see in the image below how close you’d have to sit based on the screen size you have, or you can use the handy calculator here. What goes unsaid in the marketing pitch is that for most small screen experiences, seating distance is greater than the distance required to fully realize 4K’s added detail (typical TV viewing distance in the US is 9 feet), which explains why it has traditionally been reserved for the big screen. In other words, 4K’s benefits reveal themselves in viewing environments foreign to 99% of users.
 

Most sit too far away to appreciate HD, much less UHD.

 
You’ll find that most 4K sets are pretty large (55″+), in order to take advantage of the resolution. But as the charts bear out, your typical living room or basement is hardly set up to take advantage of 1080p, much less 4K. If you’re sitting farther away than the 7 ft recommended distance for that screen size, you’re not resolving all of the picture detail in a 1080p image. For 4K, you’d need to sit no more than 3 feet from a 55″ screen to resolve its full benefit. Yeah. It’s why Blu-ray.com reviewers use a 75″ model or greater for conducting their tests. Their assessment rooms are set up specifically to measure picture performance in ways that would prove impractical for most home setups.

In sum, resolution is about the distance from the screen as much as the size of the screen. The larger the screen and the closer your face is to it, the more resolution matters, and vice versa. It’s why commercial cinema and professional video editing are best positioned to capture the full benefits of 4K. For the format to truly shine, that is, what you really need is a projector and dedicated screen — mimicking what you’ll find at your local cinema. Provided you have the space to accommodate it, a projection system will allow you to experience the minute detail of 4K without resorting to unrealistic viewing distances.

Content Availability

Whenever a new spec is announced, a chicken and egg dilemma ensues. The 3D and Full HD formats were incorporated into HDTVs and set-top boxes a good year or two before relevant content was dense enough to justify the purchase. That burden now falls to 4K. The fact remains that most of what you can watch on your screen is sub-4K. Your dusty DVD collection is all in standard-def. Most of the programming on Netflix, Hulu Plus, HBO, Showtime, Comcast, DirecTV, etc. tops out at 1080p. And other than the small amount of UHD discs now available, all Blu-ray movies are 1080p.

If you want true 4K content, you’ll need to be proactive. The best medium right now for getting your 4K fix is probably YouTube, which has allowed 4K uploads since 2010, and more recently Vimeo. Both platforms now offer a serviceable supply of independently created 4K content, though you may find the high bandwidth and processing power required to stream these videos smoothly negates the high-res benefits.

Many of the Blu-rays released to date on the Ultra HD format, moreover, were not originally captured in 4K digital, but were merely converted to 4K for the reissue. Even the Mad Max UHD was upscaled from a 2K digital intermediate. And when Netflix, for instance, says they stream House of Cards and Breaking Bad in 4K to compatible TVs, we need to be clear on what this means. House of Cards was in fact recorded in 4K starting in 2014 (Season 2), so would be considered true 4K. Breaking Bad, however, used the 1080i format and would thus be upconverted to 2160p before being streamed over the network. For its part, Amazon uses 4K for their full-length original series and pilots.

It bears repeating that a lot of what gets marketed as “4K” is actually up-rezzed 4K. I’ll have more to say on video games below, but many console games on the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro can scale to 4K upon output, but this does not mean they use native 4K assets. (The titles marketed as ‘Enhanced for the One X‘ usually do not, and you can easily tell by the size of the queued download). Naturally, native 4K is going to outclass scaled 4K. The demos in the big-box stores are playing natively recorded 4K produced specifically to show off the format. You’re looking at a best-case scenario. At home, you may find that other ostensibly 4K content doesn’t hold up as well.

This brings us directly to the next caveat of 4K: scaling. What the lack of content ultimately means is that if you get a 4K TV, the vast majority of what you view on it will be upscaled — converted from a lower resolution. It’s a general rule that content displayed in its native resolution is inherently preferred to scaled content. Ideally, all source material would match the resolution of your fixed pixel display, allowing you to bypass the lossy process altogether. But given current concerns around availability, this will be the exception and not the rule for 4K displays.

Obviously, the quality of the scaling will be key here. More expensive 4K devices will generally be fitted with higher quality chipsets and yield better results. A quality scaler may perform adequately for 1080p content, but not so well for lower-res content. To be fair, this is always the case when resizing non-native sources, but artifacting could be amplified in the case of 4K due to the high amount of interpolation involved. You should expect more picture distortions from upsampling a 720p image to 4K than that same image to 1080p, for example.

Streaming

Another issue often omitted from the 4K conversation is that our internet infrastructure is simply ill-equipped to handle the high data loads the format requires. The average connection speed in the US is 8.7 Mbps, currently ranked ninth in the world. Even places with reliable broadband can have trouble playing 1080p content smoothly and consistently, given the constraints around peak bandwidth set by your ISP and the volume of traffic on your network. In these situations, streaming services compensate by dropping the bit rate, which effectively neuters any 4K presentation and renders it indistinguishable from 720p or worse.

Put briefly, if you live in a group house with a basic internet package, you’re probably not getting the highest bit rate tier in the first place, especially during periods of high traffic, so your content provider would never deliver 4K quality anyway.

This problem applies to pay-TV systems as well. Comcast, DirecTV and Dish have been promising “Full HD” for more than a decade and even now this is barely a reality except in the case of on-demand offerings. Due to the many adjustments broadcasters make in order to comply with bandwidth constraints — such as fiddling with compression ratios, filtering, and bit rates — 4K through your channel guide won’t be here any time soon.

Ultra HD Blu-ray

Much hype has been attached to Blu-ray’s new Ultra HD format. It’s been billed as the next evolution in home cinema and the best way to experience 4K — without the hassle of data caps and other previously mentioned constraints associated with streaming. Well, we’ve already discussed how the buzz over resolution fails to hold up under typical viewing conditions due to human perceptual factors. The pristine nature of Blu-ray doesn’t change that; the size of the screen you have and how far you sit from it matter a great deal.

Adding insult to injury, early reviewers are reporting a lot of bugs, such as “handshake” failures and other playback issues with the initial crop of 4K hardware. You can read Blu-ray.com’s mega-review here, in which Martin Liebman writes that “waiting just a little while longer for equipment prices to fall, handshake and other issues to disappear via firmware, and media costs to drop may be the smart approach to take.” Given the high price point of these models, the exhaustive finagling required to get everything talking and operating as it should is unacceptable.

On the software side, quality is a bit all over the map at the moment. Most of the 90 or so UHD films released so far were sourced from a 2K digital intermediate, which provides a less than dependable baseline for comparison. The first wave has suffered from a number of issues absent from their 1080p counterparts, such as more pronounced source noise, judder and other motion artifacts during pans, and aliasing. A number of critics have also complained that green screened material looks more artificial on the UHD versions such that the computer-based imagery stands out from the rest of the picture, compromising the cinematic experience.

Some titles, like The Martian and The Revenant, have scored high marks across the board, while others were actually deemed inferior to the the 1080p presentation, as in the case of Exodus: Gods and Kings, Mad Max, and Mechanic: Resurrection. These are all clear signs the tech is still in its infancy and not ready for primetime just yet. Over time, we should see more consistency across releases, including less artifacting and other ungainly distractions as the mastering teams grow more comfortable with the spec.

Market Forces

Given the above considerations, it would seem the obvious advice here would be to save your cash and avoid being sucked in by the 4K marketing hype. But — and consider this a kind of caveat within a caveat — there’s a very important reason why a 4K set may end up being your best option for a new TV purchase.

Consider that the 4K models are now the top of the line for many (all?) manufacturers. And most flagship products tend to include the best features and highest quality hardware. They often have better chipsets which offer higher quality scaling and more advanced image processing features. They tend to be more color-accurate and grayscale-accurate out of the box and offer a wider array of picture controls for tuning the picture how you want it. And they often come with a greater selection of streaming apps coupled with the latest and greatest features. That’s just generally how it works. So at a certain point in the life cycle, a manufacturer will start giving its 1080p line short shrift and begin focusing its best efforts on their 4K line.

This would effectively mean that even if the 4K resolution offers no benefit by itself, it could still be a better choice over a 1080p set due to all of the other features that accompany that 4K label, especially if HDR with 10-bit color decoders and expanded color gamuts are in the offing. It all depends on how the market evolves, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we had reached this point already.
 

Avatar 2 is slated to be shot in 4K.

Bottom Line

Here’s what we can conclude: If you’re not editing video and photo on studio monitors or feeding pictures to a projector (i.e., most people), 4K is mostly overkill. Unless you plan on investing in a front projection system for your home theater, or you’re one of the few who sit no more than a few feet from their direct-view sets, you’ll gain little to no discernible benefit over your existing HD set in the way of resolution. So if you have a quality 1080p display, hold onto it; your standard Blu-rays will still awe your friends and you won’t have to contend with scaling were you to feed them to a 4K setup.

If you’re in the market for a new HDTV and your highest priority is picture quality, my advice would actually be to hunt down a 1080p plasma display on Amazon, eBay, or wherever you can get your hands on one. Plasma panels were discontinued in 2014 for market-driven reasons, but still offer the best overall picture quality of any available display technology, even when compared to the latest LED-lit LCDs. In terms of black levels, contrast ratios, color saturation, viewing angles, screen uniformity, and motion resolution, plasma technology remains king (though OLED could change that). Look for one in the Pioneer Kuro, Panasonic VT60 or ZT60, or Samsung F8500 lines. New and unboxed will be difficult to find at this point, but there are plenty of good deals on used sets if you know where to look.

If you absolutely must have the cutting edge and really want UHD, you’re better off waiting until the tech matures. In a year or two, the hardware should be more reliable and conform closer to the target specs, the studios will have had more experience with the format, and the content deficit should be addressed.

Addendum: 4K Gaming

With the recent release of “4K consoles” in the form of the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, I wanted to add a brief note about 4K in the context of the latest gaming systems. Many of the above caveats with respect to the 4K format apply here, but we’d be remiss if we based our buying decision solely on that bullet point. Indeed, there are several reasons that make these consoles worthwhile for the avid gamer, even if you’re considering them as an upgrade from the vanilla versions. And those reasons have next to nothing to do with resolution.

While both consoles are being marketed on their 4K merits, the better excuse to pony up for these beasts has to do with the increased memory bandwidth and overall more powerful hardware baked into the new architecture. The sizable advantage each has over its predecessor translates into things like higher and more stable frame rates, faster load times, higher fillrate, more aggressive anti-aliasing, increased draw distance, additional and more detailed particle effects and textures, improved lighting and destruction physics, and other behind-the-scenes feats not possible on their launch counterparts. Each of these benefits individually will have a far greater impact on the gaming experience than the resolution increase alone.

And even then, not all games will natively render in 4K anyway. Many, such as Halo 5, employ dynamic resolution scaling to ensure consistent performance in accordance with on-screen demands. Ironically enough, one of the best arguments for Halo 5 on the One X is that you will finally get 1080p (minimum) rendering — something the vanilla One was incapable of doing.

When it comes to the Xbox One and PS4 Pro, it’s not, ultimately, the 4K potential that should make you reach for your wallet. It’s rather the constellation of improvements directly tied to the more able hardware that in combination deliver a superior interactive experience — be it on a 1080p display or otherwise.

Further reading:

• Four 4K TV facts you must know
• What is 4K UHD? Next-generation resolution explained
• 1080p Does Matter – Here’s When
• 4K Calculator – Do You Benefit?
• TV Size to Distance Calculator and Science
• 4k vs 1080p and upscaling: Is UHD worth the upgrade?
• Everything We Know About Ultra HD Blu-ray
• 10 Reasons Plasma Died
• Xbox One backwards compatibility: how does it actually work?

 
 
Note: This guide has been publicly available in various places around the web since 2010. You can download a copy from my Academia research page here.
 
I.     Display Discovery
II.    HDTV Settings
III.  HDMI Color Space
IV.   Reference Levels
V.     Sources

Introduction

Following the release of the HDMI-equipped Xbox 360 in 2007, Microsoft issued a system update which added a set of new options under System Settings specifically for the HDMI interface. With its unified transfer of digital audio and video over a single cable, HDMI has quickly become the connection of choice in most homes. The HDMI spec itself has gone through a number of revisions since its inauguration in December of 2002, with terminology, feature support and cable designations all shifting ground. Getting everyone in the consumer electronics industry—from display manufacturers to set-top box producers to content creators—to speak the same language has proved a considerable challenge. HDMI-related settings buried in home theater equipment menus are often inconsistently labeled and accompanied by particularly vague descriptions. Thus it would appear the confusion does not begin and end with the consumer, but extends to manufacturers as well.

This guide is an attempt to demystify settings specific to the HDMI interface commonly found on HDMI-compatible devices. While this write-up will make clear the preferred settings for the Xbox 360 console, the information here is equally applicable to other A/V equipment. As will be apparent, there are no universally preferred settings due to the intrinsically complex nature of video interfacing. However, with minimal effort you can ensure that your Xbox 360 and other devices are configured correctly for the best possible image and audio quality.

Note 1: The HDMI out port is located directly under the AV cable slot, to the right of the serial number and manufacturing date label. You must have your Xbox 360 connected via HDMI to a display device to make use of the settings described here. If connected via different cables, many of these settings will be grayed out.

Note 2: The Xbox 360 console supports up to HDMI Spec 1.2. As the specs are backward compatible, there should be no interoperability issues when using AV equipment with different HDMI version numbers. Do note that feature availability is governed by the principle of lowest common denominator support: in order to take advantage of features found in any given spec, all devices in the chain must support that spec.

Note 3: A brief note about HDMI cables. Much internet bandwidth has been spent on protecting consumers from falling prey to Monster and similarly overpriced cable dealers. With digital signals, either the 1s and 0s are transmitted in their entirety, or they are not and the errors are immediately obvious; there is no degraded middle ground. Marketing duplicity notwithstanding, there is zero difference in audiovisual quality between the cheapest HDMI cable versus the exorbitantly priced “gold-plated“ Monster-branded bunco. Simply buy a High Speed cable from Monoprice and save. (Note that runs over 50 feet may require an active cable or repeating device to transmit the signal, as there are tolerances built around distance for the HDMI spec. But again, the cable will either work perfectly, or it won’t and you’ll be able to tell right away; if it works, buying any other cable won’t improve the signal in any way.)

Lastly, the labeling of HDMI connectors has gone through a number of iterations over the years. On the heels of Spec 1.3, the HDMI consortium sought to streamline the designations to minimize confusion. The previously used ‘Version’ and ‘Category’ monikers have now been relegated to two simple groupings: Standard and High Speed. A High Speed with Ethernet HDMI lead will prove hiccup-free for 99% of all A/V scenarios.

Getting Started

On the Dashboard, navigate to Console Settings –> Display, and you will see a list of output options. We will be discussing the following four items, in this order: Display Discovery, HDTV Settings, HDMI Color Space and Reference Levels.

Display Discovery

The 360’s Display Discovery feature makes use of EDID to automatically configure the output resolution for your Xbox 360. When this is enabled, the console will query your HDTV for its native resolution and adjust the console’s output resolution to match. This feature only applies to output resolution and does not impact color space or reference level settings. DD is usually harmless, except in the rare situation that your HDTV’s EDID is read improperly or returns invalid data. Either way, feel free to disable this setting and manually select the output resolution in HDTV Settings.

HDTV Settings

This screen allows you to select the output resolution of the Xbox 360. Generally, the output resolution of your A/V devices should match the native resolution of your display. For example, if your HDTV is 1080p (marketed “Full HD” by many manufacturers), your equipment should output 1080p. This will allow you to enable “Dot by Dot” features on your display, which preserves 1:1 pixel mapping of the input signal with zero overscan. However, several caveats apply:

• Scaling performance varies across A/V equipment. The rule of thumb is to allow the device with the superior upconversion software to handle the scaling. The graphics scaler in the X360 is top-drawer and optimized for graphics with minimal scaling artifacts. So if your display is native 1080p, for example, this would mean setting your Xbox 360 to 1080p, even if the game in question does not run natively at 1080p (more on this below). For video content, however, a high-end HDTV, AVR or pre-pro will generally have better upconversion than the Xbox 360. So for video it’s optimal to match the X360 output resolution to that of your source. For example, if the source is a DVD (480p), set the X360 to 480p and outsource the upconversion to the downstream device. If you have an intermediate device (e.g., AVR, pre-pro) between your X360 and your display that offers high quality upconversion you would again set the X360 output resolution to match the source resolution for video content, then set the intermediate device’s output resolution to match your display’s native resolution. This allows the superior device (the intermediate) to handle all image upconversion. In short, for games, it is recommended to allow the X360 to scale to the native resolution of your display, and to transfer the responsibility of video scaling downstream.

• Ideally, all source content would match the native resolution of your fixed pixel display, allowing you to avoid the lossy process of image scaling altogether. For example, sending sub-1080p content to your 1080p display will require the signal to be upscaled to 1080p at some point in the imaging chain. However, content resolutions can vary widely, especially for video games. Most Xbox 360 titles are not native 1080p. Many are below 720p, or somewhere in between 720p and 1080p. (When you look on the back of the game box, you will see: ‘HDTV 720p/1080i/1080p’. These are simply supported resolutions and do not refer to the resolution in which the game is internally rendered. Microsoft mandates that all games released on their platform are compatible with the above standard ATSC resolutions, but the GPU may draw at any number of non-standard resolutions before being scaled to the output format.) For games running at non-standard resolutions, configuring your Xbox 360 to send 720p to your 1080p display will cause two scaling steps to occur: 1) The X360 will first scale the source to 720p and 2) Your display will then upscale from 720p to 1080p. This dual scaling can introduce unwanted artifacts in the image as well as increase input lag, both of which are detriments to gaming. As above, this can be avoided by aligning the X360’s output resolution with that of your display.

• Any content that is truly native 1080p (e.g., a handful of Xbox 360 titles, some Xbox One and PS4 titles, Blu-ray movies) should be output in 1080p to a native 1080p display, eliminating any scaling of the signal.

• Just because you set your Xbox 360 to 1080p and you see a signal on your HDTV does not mean your HDTV is native 1080p. Some “720p” displays, for example, accept 1080p but then downscale to their native resolution (which is generally 1366×768; see below). Make sure you know the resolution of your HDTV.

• While many HDTVs are marketed as “720p”, no LCD TV or computer monitor or plasma display sold in the States actually has a native resolution of 720p (1280×720). Due to manufacturing considerations, any LCD TV or monitor labeled “720p” actually has a native resolution of 1366×768 (WXGA), while the few lingering plasma displays marketed as “720p” actually have a native resolution of 1024×768 (XGA). Due to the tricky, multi-step resizing required, and the fact that 1:1 pixel mapping is impossible as there is no popular content encoded in 768p, it is recommended to avoid 768p sets in favor of 1080p sets. If you do have a 768p monitor or television, the Xbox 360 offers 1360×768 as an output format over HDMI. While strictly speaking this isn’t an exact match to the pixel array of your display, the difference is negligible (there will be an imperceptibly thin border of unused pixels along the side). The X360 also offers a number of other resolution sizes for a variety of monitors, including WVGA (848×480), XGA (1024×768), WXGA (1280×768), SXGA (1280×1024), WXGA+ or WSXGA (1440×900) and WSXGA+ (1680×1050). As above, you should choose the resolution closest to your display, regardless of the game you’re playing.

Note: There’s one fundamental difference between console and PC gaming as regards resolution. While PC games are resolution-independent, disc-based console games are optimized for the fixed hardware of the console platform. So while PC games can be rendered up to whatever resolution your graphics card can handle, console games are programmed to run at a native resolution, which is then upscaled in hardware (if necessary) to the chosen output resolution of the Xbox 360.

HDMI Color Space

When HDMI output was first introduced with the Elite console in 2007, only the Reference Levels setting was available and the Xbox 360 only output RGB. A later system update added the full suite of color space options:

• Auto
• Source
• RGB
• YCbCr601
• YCbCr709

A color space is simply a mathematical representation of color based on a particular color model. Color spaces designed for the visual display industry are all based on the additive RGB color model, which is itself derived from the trichromatic visual system encoded in human biology. Since we want our reproduced images to be as lifelike as possible, it only makes sense that our imaging systems would be modeled after our tristimulus architecture.

It all started in the late 1920s with novel research by two vision scientists who conceived of a method for specifying color sensation in numerical terms. Building from experiments done by William David Wright and John Guild, the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) devised the first ever color space by plotting visible wavelengths of light in a three-dimensional figure. That figure, intended to encompass the full gamut of human vision, is the 1931 CIE XYZ color space. We’ve been refining and expanding upon this opening effort ever since as we’ve learned more about the eye’s sensitivity to different wavelengths and our technological capabilities have improved.
 

1931 CIE Chromaticity Diagram

Chroma Subsampling

Due to storage and bandwidth limitations in the analog era, the broadcast industry adopted compression techniques for reducing the size of the video signal. This was accomplished by applying a kind of triage to perceptual relevance. Because the human visual system is much more sensitive to variations in brightness than color, a video system can be bandwidth-optimized by devoting more overhead to the luma (brightness) component (denoted Y’) than to the color difference components, Cb and Cr (collectively, chroma). This technique, called chroma subsampling, is where you get YCbCr (often abbreviated to YCC). As an alternative to sending uncompressed RGB, YCbCr is a common compression format used to encode data within a particular color space and results in negligible visual difference.

So practical was YCbCr that the broadcast industry embraced it and never looked back. The ITU-R adopted it as the primary encoding scheme for use in their Rec. 601 and, later in 1990, Rec. 709 standards that govern electronic broadcasting. While modern digital distribution systems are not as capacity-conscious as legacy analog systems, there is still a need for video and color compression in order to allow dense 1080p video to be stored on a Blu-ray Disc, for example, or HD streams to be squeezed through crowded networks. So although the bandwidth of an HDMI cable is more than adequate for carrying uncompressed (4:4:4) RGB color format, there is still the twin bottleneck of optical disc media and internet infrastructure to contend with on the horizon. Today, all cable, satellite and OTA (over-the-air) video streams, DVD and Blu-ray titles, along with Netflix and other streaming services, store color information using this YCbCr format.

Rec. 601 and Rec. 709

The Rec. 601 and Rec. 709 standards specify, among other picture parameters, formulas for converting YCbCr to and from RGB. As the maths are different, the Xbox 360 provides both options and you will want to use the appropriate format for the content you are viewing.

For standard-definition video, such as DVDs and 480i/p content streams, you should use YCbCr601, which outputs the official Rec. 601 color space standard. For all HD video, including 720p/1080i/p video streams, you should use YCbCr709, which outputs the color coordinates for Rec. 709. The color decoders in most HDTVs can handle both matrices, so they will detect the incoming color space flags and perform the proper conversion to RGB without a hitch.

RGB

While video-based content speaks in YCbCr language, games are an entirely different animal. Naturally, different standards and recommendations apply. Similar to PC, console games are internally rendered by the GPU in native 8-bit RGB. This is true for games as well as the X360 dashboard, both of which run in native RGB space. Thus, to avoid any unnecessary processing you should always have your Xbox 360 set to RGB for games. Otherwise, the native RGB format is transcoded and resampled to YCbCr, which will then be decoded back to RGB once it reaches the display device. More conversions = increased opportunity for errors and input lag. As RGB is the universal color format of visual displays, all HDMI-compliant sets accept it.

(There really is no good reason why the X360 even allows for YCbCr output for games. In contrast, the PS3 allows games to run in RGB mode only; YCbCr is reserved exclusively for BD/DVD playback. If set to YCbCr, the PS3 will auto-switch to RGB when the game flag is detected, and when playing back Blu-rays you can switch between YCbCr and RGB. My best guess is Microsoft provided this option because the console at one time did not indicate the RGB quantization range correctly for the receiving device, so converting to YCbCr would force the 16-235 range for a display that expects that range—more on this in the Reference Levels section.)

Auto and Source

These two settings attempt to remove some of the guesswork on behalf of the user. Personally, I prefer to take the automaticity away from the machine and manually force the appropriate setting. HDMI negotiations between source and sink aren’t perfect, and mangled communication can de-optimize your setup. So unless specific options aren’t available, I recommend explicitly setting color space and reference levels.

Auto setting selects the color space format which your display is set to receive according to HDMI protocols. The Enhanced Display Data Channel (E-DDC) embedded in the HDMI chip of the X360 queries and reads the E-EDID data from the HDMI sink device (display), and then negotiates the optimal output, usually behaving like the Source setting below. The HDMI Auto setting found in Blu-ray players and other home theater components follow this process as well.

The Source setting adapts to the incoming color space format detected in the signal. If a DVD flag is detected, the X360 should switch to YCbCr601 output. If an HD video stream is detected, it should switch to YCbCr701. For games and the dashboard interface, the X360 will default to RGB.

Color Space Wrap-Up

To wrap up, some HDMI-friendly electronics, like the Xbox 360, offer both YCbCr and RGB output options over HDMI. These are simply different ways of sending the same signal, the former being compressed and the latter uncompressed. For video-based content, one is not necessarily “better” than the other because no matter which you choose, the same conversion steps are happening; all you are choosing is which device is performing the conversion. As you’ll recall, the pixels of a digital display are red, green and blue, so whichever color format is output from a source device, the display must ultimately have an RGB signal to work with before the pixels in the display can be illuminated. This is the same process no matter what display technology is being used, whether LCD, plasma, DLP or CRT.

The only situation in which this may matter (again, for video only) is if the color decoder in the source or sink device is faulty. Converting between RGB and YCC is simple math and is lossless (assuming the software uses enough bits of precision), but I have seen cases in which one device does not handle the conversion properly. (Using test material will help you identify if your setup has any issues of this variety.) If the conversion is handled properly, there should be no visual difference between the two formats.

The choice becomes important, however, in the case of gaming consoles. Since games are rendered natively in RGB, only the RGB setting makes sense here. Assuming there are no color decoding errors bungling the video chain, the principle of sought accuracy suggests sending a YCC signal for video and RGB for games.

Note 1: While NTSC region DVD video follows the Rec. 601 standard, most PAL region DVDs conform to the Rec. 709 standard.

Note 2: For streaming services like Netflix and Hulu Plus that optimize picture quality according to available bandwidth, it is less clear-cut which color standard will be present in the stream. For these services, it is generally best to use the Xbox 360 options Source or Auto, which adapt to the signal’s color space.

Note 3: All Blu-ray media is encoded in 8-bit YCbCr 4:2:0. (The three-part ratio is the subsampling format.) Some players give you multiple color format options, including YCC 4:2:2, YCC 4:4:4 and RGB (4:4:4). One caveat revealed by video technicians Spears and Munsil regards the native processing mode of the chip in the display device. Some HDTV chips are designed for only one color format and will process all incoming formats by first resampling to its native format. For example, a chip designed exclusively for 4:2:2 processing will convert an RGB (4:4:4) signal back to YCbCr 4:2:2, then upsample to YCbCr 4:4:4 before finally converting to RGB (4:4:4). In these cases, it might actually be disadvantageous to decode in the player. Finally, some Blu-ray players actually convert to RGB (4:4:4) before forwarding the signal through the HDMI output, even if no RGB output option from the player is provided. Good test material will aid in sorting out these nuances.

Reference Levels

Now we come to Reference Levels, far and away the most important setting, as choosing incorrectly (i.e., sending the wrong range) can muck up the hallowed black level you paid so much for. Reference Level is Microsoft’s terminology for quantization range, which governs the number of discrete steps or values that can be assigned to a subpixel. There are two and only two ranges used for visual displays. The first, 0-255, is formally known as PC or IT quantization range (used in computing, including PC hardware, gaming consoles and computer monitors). The second, 16-235, is formally known as CE or video quantization range (used in televisions and all commercial video).

First, a quick word about terminology. It is unfortunate indeed that equipment manufacturers don’t use consistent labels for these settings. Samsung, Microsoft, Panasonic, LG, etc. seem to all use different names. The easiest solution it seems to me is to just write out the range in the menus: 16-235 or 0-255. Alas, numbers can be scary and so most manufacturers use their own nomenclature. Those proprietary designations that map to 16-235 include Low, Limited, Video and Standard. Those that map to 0-255 include High, Full, Expanded, Extended, Enhanced and Normal.

You’ll note that I specified two ranges above, while Microsoft offers three. Reference Level Standard corresponds to 16-235, Expanded to 0-255, and Intermediate, well, Intermediate is not a standardized range at all. Microsoft appears to have invented this setting out of thin air. According to histogram testing, Intermediate outputs somewhere in the ballpark of  ~8…~245, so perhaps it was included as a compromise solution for people who can’t resolve the right negotiation for their setup. At any rate, Intermediate should only be used as a last-resort stopgap for deficiencies existing elsewhere in the imaging chain.1

0-255 vs. 16-235

Both PC and CE quantization range are based on 8-bit color depth. An 8-bit color depth allows for 256 possible gradations of color (2^8), varying from black at the weakest intensity (0) to white at the strongest intensity (255). The only difference between the two ranges is where reference black and white are positioned. With PC range, 0 is reference black and 255 is reference white, for a total of 256 discrete steps. CE range, on the other hand, places reference black at 16 and reference white at 235 along the same 0-255 scale, leaving 220 discrete steps to which values may be assigned.

Why the inconsistency? Ask the video engineers. Due to limitations intrinsic to video broadcasting—from capture to encoding to transmission—the final signal may not always fall neatly into the specified range. For a variety of technical reasons, data intended for grayscale level 2, for example, may slip to level 0 or be clipped altogether by the time it reaches your display. This is much less of a concern in the all-digital distribution pipelines of today, but engineers decided at the time on a 16-235 range, building headroom (235-254) and toeroom (1-15) around those upper and lower values so signals slipping outside the nominal range could still be reproduced by the end user if desired.

In the land of video, 16 and 235 are reference levels, not hard limits. Any data below level 16 is referred to as blacker-than-black (BTB), and any data above level 235 is referred to as whiter-than-white (WTW). (Note that these terms only apply when discussing video/CE range.) 0 and 255, on the other hand, are indeed hard limits.

It is important to understand that 0-255 does not result in “deeper blacks” or “brighter whites” compared with 16-235. Both ranges simply possess a different number of tonal gradations between reference black and reference white. As long as the display is set to receive the range the source device is sending, reference black and reference white for both ranges are the same intensity to the end user (i.e., black level 0 in PC mode should appear the same as black level 16 in video mode).

All of this has important implications for the type of content you’re sending to your screen. Anything you watch on cable or satellite, anything broadcast OTA, DVD and Blu-ray movies, and Netflix and other streaming media are all mastered according to the 16-235 CE range. We can now complete the circle we began in the section on color space above. You’ll recall that all of the same media is stored using YCbCr. It turns out that the HDMI spec stipulates CE range (video levels) for the YCbCr format.

Section 6.6 of the HDMI Spec reads:

 
Thus, YCbCr is limited range (16-235) by design. Because of this, it is unaffected by the Reference Level setting on the Xbox 360. And since YCbCr cannot be output at PC range, the Reference Level setting affects RGB output only. You can test this for yourself. Switch to YCbCr mode and toggle between the three Reference Levels; no effect. It would be less confusing for consumers if the option was simply grayed out when in YCbCr mode. Unfortunately it’s not, resulting in many a gamer straining to pick up differences that aren’t there.

For games, it’s a different story. They don’t use YCbCr. As with video-based material above, we can now complete the circle. Game graphics are rendered in the GPU’s frame buffer at PC range (0-255). (I’m not aware of any GPUs that can even output native 16-235 range.) Thus, everything other than video is rendered natively in 0-255 RGB space, making RGB Expanded the preferred setting for games. Using 0-255 end-to-end can also help reduce banding in-game due to the additional levels of gradation available. If instead you set your X360 to Standard, this will require the GPU to render at 0-255 which will then be requantized to 16-235 upon output. Configuring the console for 0-255 (Expanded) will avoid this unnecessary step.

Source and Sink Agreement

The ultimate objective here is to ensure that source and sink, and everything in between, are in agreement. This will ensure reference black and white output from the source are in sync with the reference tones the display is expecting. Which Reference Level to use becomes an easy answer if the display you are using can only reproduce one or the other. For example, most PC monitors have only one display mode (0-255), so using Expanded here is the obvious choice. As for HDTVs, most top-tier models can switch into both ranges over HDMI. If yours doesn’t have a PC mode or anything with 0-255 in the label, you will be stuck with Standard Reference Level.

Keep in mind that most HDTVs and other home theater equipment are configured for video levels by default. You may need to dig into your menus and toggle it over if you want to use Expanded Reference Level for games. Remember, while full range RGB is the best way to output games from the Xbox 360, it only works if the display expects full range. Make sure they match.

Here’s what to look for. If you send Standard range (16-235) to a display expecting Expanded range (0-255), the image will appear washed out and your contrast ratio will suffer: see Quadrant 3 below. Low-end detail gets the shaft because your 360 is placing black level at 16, while your display is placing black level at 0. Conversely, if you send Expanded range (0-255) to a display expecting Standard range (16-235), you’ll get a mixture of crushed black detail and crushed white detail, not a good combo: see Quadrant 2 below. Your game will look too dark because your 360 is placing black level at 0, while your HDTV is placing black level at 16; thus every gradation between 0 and ~16 is being crushed, and every gradation above 235 is also being crushed. Quadrants 1 and 4 are examples of Expanded-Expanded and Standard-Standard, respectively.

The image below is used here courtesy of NeoGaf forums user Raist in this post.
 

4-way comparison of Reference Level matching

Finally, for those serious about calibrating their display, I cannot recommend enough Spears and Munsil’s immaculate HD Benchmark disc, now in its 2^nd edition.

Note 1: Many games offer an in-game brightness tool with instructions for how to pass the pattern. This should be the last thing you touch, if at all. Make sure source and sink are in agreement first and your display’s brightness and contrast are calibrated properly. Then bring up the brightness pattern included with the game. If you’re not able to pass the pattern, then and only then should you adjust the in-game brightness control. This should be done on a case-by-case basis. You should never adjust TV controls to pass an in-game brightness pattern because those settings may be wrong for every other game, movie, etc., requiring constant recalibration. Instead, the preferred approach is to tweak the in-game brightness control per game, if necessary, to bring the game into alignment with your display calibration, not the other way around.

Note 2: If you’re using a receiver or other intermediate device, make sure it doesn’t clip 0-255 to 16-235. Some models are known to truncate whatever signal they receive such that they only pass 16-235.

Note 3: While most video mastering engineers strictly adhere to the 16-235 range, a few may intentionally place detail above 235. For example, white detail in clouds or sky, or white clothing may exceed reference white (235). If your display is calibrated to show a bit of WTW, you will see this extra detail. If the display is not calibrated to show it or is unable to show it, then the detail will be clipped. (Put differently, that image area will be the same grayscale level as your highest distinguishable grayscale level.) Calibrating a peak white level for your display is largely personal preference and you may be limited by the adjustment range of your system as well as your viewing environment. The same applies to BTB data. (This note only applies to video-based material and not to games.)

Note 4: In the PC world, many video cards do not remap levels with especially high precision and could introduce banding in the image. If optimal IQ is desired, reducing the amount of levels conversion will yield the best results. For PC games connected to HDTVs, this means making sure all equipment in the chain maintains 0-255 range. For displaying video-based content on a PC, there are a number of drivers out there that can map to video levels.

Note 5: One of the Xbox 360 system updates borked the reference level settings for the dashboard and a number of media apps (games were unaffected). The issue has now been fixed in most if not all video apps, as well as in the dashboard (bar the picture viewer). Games are still flagged correctly.

Sources

• Understanding Color
• Introduction to Colour Science
• Choosing a Color Space
• A Review of RGB Color Spaces
• HDMI Enhanced Black Levels, xvYCC and RGB
• xvYCC and Deep Color
• YCbCr to RGB Considerations
• Color Subsampling, or What is 4:4:4 or 4:2:2?
•  What is YUV?
• Understanding Color Processing: 8-bit, 10-bit, 32-bit, and More
• HDMI 1.2 Specification
• HDMI 1.3a Specification
• Post Processing in The Orange Box
• The ARRI Companion to Digital Intermediate
• Laser TV: Ultra-Wide Gamut for a New Extended Color-Space Standard, xvYCC
• Comparison of HDMI 1.0-1.3 and HDMI 1.4 Usages in the Commercial and Residential Markets
• Spears & Munsil official website
• Unofficial Oppo BDP-83 FAQs

1. On the Xbox One, the Color Space Standard setting is the equivalent of the Xbox 360’s Reference Level Limited setting (16-235), while Color Space PC RGB is the equivalent of Reference Level Expanded (0-255).

 
 
The cinema space is abuzz over The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, but not just over Bilbo Baggins and his ensuing adventures against the legions of Sauron. Orcs are slain and goblins lanced, yet discussion of the film has largely vectored around Peter Jackson’s unorthodox frame rate choice. While the New Zealand auteur is no stranger to innovation, his latest entry in Tolkien’s fantasy realm features one minor major technical departure: it is the first box office release both recorded and projected in 48 frames per second. Popular opinion seems to occupy one of two extremes, with its detractors the more outspoken of the bunch.

The backlash over the technical presentation did not come without warning. When Jackson debuted The Hobbit at last year’s CinemaCon in Las Vegas, the showing was met with splintered ambivalence. Some attendees cited its crisp motion compared with the legacy 24 fps format, while others dispraised its “non-cinematic” feel in concert with its rapid disintegration of the suspension of disbelief. Theater owners mostly expressed disdain over having to upgrade their 3D projection systems, a hardly trifling fee of $10,000 per screen.

In an industry which fosters innovation and traditionally greets bigger numbers with gusto, the recent friction over The Hobbit’s screening format may seem curious. After all, 48 is exactly twice the established standard, which means you are seeing double the information every second. So why is 24 fps broadly considered “cinematic” and 48 fps less so? And why are filmmakers like Jackson, Andy Serkis and James Cameron pushing for HFR (High Frame Rate) formats?

Silent Film and Beyond

With his penchant for particulars and visual flair, it’s fair to say that Jackson did not take the decision to deviate from the industry standard of more than 80 years lightly. As he details in a pre-release Facebook post, the early film era’s choice to commercialize 24 fps was one of compromise. Most people assume 24 is a magical number for film or holds some sort of psychophysical significance. Not so.

Prior to the late 1920s, there was no agreed-upon recording speed, film stock or projection speed. The first silent films were shot with variable frame rates, with some dipping as as low as 14 frame/s. Such a speed was barely enough to maintain the illusion of motion; viewers today would find the jerkiness nigh unwatchable. In the theater houses, projectionists would even alter the rate of playback to match the musical accompaniment or on-the-fly to maximize profits.

When sound film arrived, this model was no longer sustainable. Fixed image timings became necessary in order to sync picture and sound and to escape the dissonance created by mismatches in audiovisual playback. Which timing to choose hinged sensitively on the type of film stock, which is enormously expensive to buy and to process. Prior to the digital era, a film’s primary costs were a function of the width of the film stock (known as the gauge) and capture speed. All else equal, a 14 fps film was roughly 70% cheaper to shoot than a 24 fps film, while a 35mm production is roughly half as expensive as the 70mm IMAX format used in Christopher Nolan’s previous two Batman films.

As the industry convened around 35mm stock, an economic ceiling was naturally placed on capture speed. In the end it was 24 frame/s which struck a delicate equilibrium between cost-effectiveness and motion continuity. It’s likely that every movie you’ve seen at the cinema or on DVD and Blu-ray was originally recorded progressively at a rate of 24 images per second. On most playback systems, each frame is then displayed multiples times to reduce flicker.1

In a presentation on frame rate, videographer Mark Schubin tells us candidly, “There is absolutely nothing special about 24 frames per second. There is no particular psychological reason for it, no mathematical reason for it.”

The Allure of HFR

As HFR’s proponents have pointed out, none of the constraints around the 24 frame format applies to today’s world of digital ubiquity. Digital production costs do not scale dramatically with frame rate, and the latest in digital imaging allows for a variety of speeds, from 48 to 60 to 10,000 frame/s, and even speeds faster than the speed of light. Current technology is now able to capitalize on our visual system’s potential in ways that were simply not possible in the 1920s. While the human eye is unable to take in many thousands of unique images per second, 48 veers much closer to our biological limits than does 24.2

This boost in capture speed carries immediate visual improvements, namely an increase in motion resolution. If you’ve ever seen a fast-paced pan of the camera while watching a movie, you’ve likely noticed the jerkiness. This is because there are not enough frames in the source to maintain smooth motion. Filmmakers are reflexively cognizant of this (there are even tables which calculate the maximum speed of camera pans before strobing occurs) and ensure that their pans do not spill over a specified threshold. With 48 and higher frame rates, this problem goes away. With more frames to work with, camera movements are more stable, lending quick pans and the choreography of action scenes greater intelligibility.

Image via reduser.net

Jackson is well aware of this, having employed over two dozen RED EPIC cameras in his 3D production of The Hobbit. While HFR can give 2D exhibitions a more lifelike edge, its benefits are most palpable in 3D presentations, where artifacts like flicker, blur and crosstalk tend to be exacerbated. In the traditional 3D cinema experience, each eye is alternately sent 24 unique frames each second. For theaters capable of HFR playback, each eye receives 48 unique frames, resulting in a smoother, less headache-inducing visual experience.3 Jackson chose to release the HFR format for 3D exhibition only; all 2D exhibitions will be shown in the traditional 24-frame format. (Check here for a current list of theaters upgraded to 48-frame projection systems.)

For commercial purposes, 48 fps has the added benefit of being fully backward-compatible with legacy 24-frame playback systems.

The (Dis)Comfort Zone

Ultimately, the disfavor surrounding The Hobbit‘s higher frame rates stems not from an unrefined use of props, lighting and CGI, as some have suggested, but from our stiffly conditioned sensorium. We’re simply not used to viewing movies this way. Our lifelong familiarity with 24-frame cinema has etched its signature into our collective subconscious.

Though it might seem like the jump from 24 to 48 is not significant, it is massive in terms of how our optical system responds and adjusts. The added smoothness unshackles our suspension of disbelief we so intimately associate with low-motion content, ejecting us from the fantasy world of Middle Earth and onto the set, where props are revealed for what they really are. In short, a closer approximation of reality is exchanged for the filmic, almost surreal quality we identify with the cinema experience.

High-motion content is abundant outside of movies. Since the destination of broadcast material, including sports and news coverage and low-budget programming, is in the living room rather than the theater, this content is typically recorded on video at 30 frame/s.4 The visual flavor of this type of content seems every bit as natural to us as the flavor of film-based content. Our years of conditioning means that we subliminally associate different species of programming with their capture rates.

Those who own newer high-definition TVs have likely already experienced HFR movies, albeit in exaggerated and simulated form. Most flat panels today, especially 120 Hz and 240 Hz LCDs, come equipped with MCFI (motion compensation via frame interpolation), which synthesizes new frames from existing ones to enhance motion resolution.5 When this effect is applied to movies captured at 24 fps, the cinematic feel is upgraded to the feel of the high-motion programming described above. Commonly called the “soap opera effect”, this not only boosts the level of realism to uncomfortably high levels but distorts director intent by creating new frames not present in the film source. The core difference between The Hobbit and motion processing at home, of course, is that the high-motion in The Hobbit is not simulated; the frames are present in the source material.

Adapt or Go Home

As with any new technology, HFR will need to survive an incubation period. Sound, color, widescreen, digital projection, 3D; all have had their share of doomsayers, yet cinema lives on. Jackson’s Hobbit format provides us more sensory information and is actually closer to reality than what we’re used to, the same promises accompanying every other industry revision since silent film. Even so, perhaps none has had as dramatic an impact on the “feel” of the film as HFR. While The Hobbit‘s juiced frame rates and hyper-realism may be initially unnerving, most agree that it is an effect that wears off after the first 20-30 minutes. After all, our sensorium is highly adaptable and, over time, we may come to associate 48 fps with cinema the way we associate 24 fps now.

For several in the industry, HFR is long overdue, and they have Peter Jackson to thank for being the first to break down commercial barriers. As Cameron and others prepare their own high frame rate presentations for the big screen, time will tell whether the tide of opinion flows toward the new medium or recedes back to the familiar embrace of the legacy format.

Footnotes:

1. When movies are shown at your local theater, each frame is flashed twice or three times to compensate for flicker arising from the inter-frame black period. Thus while the movie itself was recorded at 24p, the movie projector runs at a 48 or 72 Hz refresh rate. The same is true for digital projection and flat-panel televisions; each film frame is repeated according to the refresh rate of the display.
   
2. The human visual system’s response rate is highly dependent on the particular stimuli. For example, our sensitivity to light in dark environments is greater than our sensitivity to dark in light surrounds. Tests with Air force pilots have shown that the human eye can identify light that is flashed only for 1/220th of a second. We are capable of taking in hundreds of light emissions per second, though we vary in our ability to make distinct sense of those images as the frequencies climb higher and the stimuli change. At the end of the day, frame-based motion is merely a simulation of reality.
   
3. The figures given are for unique frames per eye. You’ll recall that for 2D theatrical presentations, each frame is flashed twice to reduce flicker. The situation is the same for 3D exhibitions. Given a 24-frame projection system, you are processing 48 total frames per eye. For 48-frame playback, this number doubles to 96 per eye.
   
4. This frame rate is easier to reproduce at home compared with 24 frame/s. Because the standard refresh cycle of televisions (in the U.S.) is 60 Hz, only a simple 2:2 pulldown is required to render 30 frame/s material. This avoids the judder which arises when 24 frame/s material is converted to 30 frame/s for proper playback on 60 Hz playback systems. This process, called telecining, is needed to make the 24-frame standard format of film compatible with video frame rates used in television and broadcast. Additionally, the economics of higher-cost film make video capture a more popular choice for low-budget programming like daytime soaps and the rest.
   
5. MCFI’s main function is to upgrade low-motion content to appear as fluid and continuous as high-motion content. The technology algorithmically creates new frames to insert between the source frames as if they were always there, thereby artificially inflating the frame rate. The quality of the results can vary broadly by manufacturer in accordance with the processor and software fitted to the display. Most HDTVs have this feature enabled by default. To annul the video-like “soap opera effect” it is the first processing feature I disable when calibrating or bringing home a new display.
   

 
 
Any home theater enthusiast will tell you when it comes to enjoying a movie or the big game, sound is (at least) half of the experience. Yet in the overly vigorous arms race for the title of “thinnest display,” the role of audio in the entertainment experience has been increasingly subjugated by panel manufacturers. It seems we’ve now reached a design apex, wherein even the most amiable of consumers have taken notice of the lackluster sound found in modern televisions.

This is why one of FutureSource’s latest publications, CES Show 2012 Report, caught my attention. As a result of consumers’ waning satisfaction of in-panel audio support, interest in sound systems appears to be growing. The trend toward ever-thinner displays means more people are making a return trip to their big-box retailer to invest in the audio side of the equation.

Samsung LED-LCD panel

Consider one of the offerings at last month’s CES. LG debuted a 55” OLED panel measuring just 3/16 of an inch in thickness, which is not substantially thinner than many of the LED-based LCDs on the market today. Now imagine that after the circuit board, LED matrix, light filters, display controller and power supply are all fitted to the panel, you must then find room to shoehorn the components that produce sound. Since most HDTVs try to at least simulate a stereo experience, two pairs of drivers are usually required, along with an amplifier.

As panel depth is trimmed more and more, driver size becomes embarrassingly small. Manufacturers have grappled with this in various ways – by moving the audio electronics to an outboard box or even storing them in the stand – but none has resulted in appreciably improved sound. Combine the laughably tiny driver size with the fact that the radiating area for sound energy is severely handicapped by the cramped positioning within the display, and you have the ideal recipe for frustratingly low sound quality.

This unfortunate reality could not have been more apparent than at the Super Bowl party I attended back in January. The gracious hosts had recently purchased a brand new Samsung plasma, mounted in a medium-sized room with no external sound system. Even at max volume with 15+ people in the room, you could barely tell any sound was coming from the TV. It may as well have been on mute.

Of course, no flat panel television on the market can compete with a dedicated audio system. Indeed, the internal speakers housed within most flat panel sets are capable of just 5-10 watts per channel of output. A $25 pair of desktop speakers could handily best that. But I at least remember older flat panels that could achieve a sufficient volume level to compensate for a noisy ambience. This is not the case any more, and while home theater enthusiasts would never settle for in-panel speakers anyway, even the layman consumer has started looking for something more.

Sound System Solutions

In an effort to preempt these concerns, I’ll briefly outline below a few of the many options you have for outsourcing the audio tasks away from your HDTV or other display. While the universe of choices are diverse and range widely in terms of sound quality and price, keep in mind that any one of them will outperform the characteristically tenuous sonics packaged with your flat panel. The recommendations below are focused on maximum value with respect to price and performance. With that in mind, let’s take a cursory scan of the current audio landscape.

Soundbars

Soundbar products – designated front-rendered sound in audio parlance – had an especially raised presence at this year’s CES. A soundbar consolidates multiple speaker channels to a single, horizontally shaped loudspeaker that can be wall-mounted below your flat panel or placed on furniture under it.  If you’re looking to maintain the clean, minimalist motif for your living room, soundbars offer the smallest physical footprint, an ideal complement to your sleek flat panel. The downside is that few soundbars can rival any kind of discrete audio setup. The majority of soundbar products found in B&M retailers are very much on the lower end of sound performance and appeal more to the casual consumer who is less concerned with sound quality. On the other hand, the two listed below are the standouts from the soundbar market – the cream of the crop –  and might be the perfect solution for those looking for minimal wiring and clutter.

stereo soundbar

Soundbar solutions come in two basic configurations – stereo or surround. A stereo soundbar can simply take the place of the speakers found in your display, with no surround simulation. A surround soundbar is designed for a multichannel experience by simulating a 5.1 or higher surround setup using digital processing technology. While front-rendered surround still has a ways to go to create as convincing a surround effect as discrete systems, today’s technologies algorithmically exploit the psychoacoustical underpinnings of human hearing to deliver an impressively intelligible surround experience.

Finally, though most soundbar products have built-in amplification, a few do not. Those that don’t require a separate receiver to power the soundbar. My top picks for both varieties are below.

1. Polk SurroundBar6000 – $450

This well-reviewed soundbar has built-in amplification and outputs respectable sound quality for the price. With a depth of just 2”, it’s incredibly slim and won’t occupy a lot of real estate around your TV. You simply connect your source device or your TV to the soundbar speaker via the included stereo RCA cables or optical cable. While it’s technically a stereo (2-channel) soundbar, the system features DSP tech to simulate a 5.1 surround experience that can be toggled on or off. A wireless subwoofer is also included to properly handle the low frequencies. Keep in mind that wireless in this sense only means the sub need not be connected to the soundbar; a power cord is still needed from the sub to the wall outlet.

2. Definitive Technology Mythos XTR-SSA5 – $1,000

The Mythos is perhaps the highest-end soundbar on the market today and is the best you can get without upgrading to a discrete multichannel system. While more expensive than the Polk, the Def Tech properly includes five discrete speakers for a more accurate, convincing soundfield and can dip down as low as 60Hz, pretty remarkable for a soundbar. This model is also much more powerful than the Polk, easily capable of overpowering background chatter at a Super Bowl party. The downside is that it requires external amplification via an AV receiver or separates.

Stereo 2.1 Setups

To really take your sound to the next level, a discrete speaker setup with a subwoofer and receiver is highly recommended. Note that while a subwoofer is not mandatory, its impact on the overall sound of your system cannot be underestimated. The sub (the .1) is irrefutably the most valuable speaker in any home theater setup because of its ability to handle the room-shaking lower frequencies. Without one, you would be missing out on a significant portion of the auditory spectrum at the low end (read: weak bass).

If you just want to replace your TV’s speakers and have no interest in surround sound, then a 2.1 configuration will do nicely and can be a lot cheaper than a full 5.1 surround setup. While a pair of stereo speakers can cost upward of $10,000, there are plenty of options that combine quality and affordability. A couple of recommended receivers (required for these systems) will also be provided at the end. Here’s my top picks for stereo pairs along with a matching sub.

1. PSB 2.1 – $900

PSB has long been venerated by audio enthusiasts for their unbeatable value. Their Image B5 bookshelf speakers and their SubSeries 100 subwoofer can be had for $900 online. The quality of this combo is hard to match. The sub is capable of extending down to 36 Hz and the large driver design will be noticeable no matter the source you happen to be playing. The bookshelf design means they can be positioned comfortably on a TV stand. If your TV is mounted on the wall, you can place these on a furniture below the TV or buy speaker stands to place on both sides of the TV.

2. Klipsch 2.1 – $920

You can’t talk about reference audio without mentioning Klipsch. Their constancy in the audio domain is not just due to high performance but also their broad selection, ranging from affordable to “if you have to ask the price, it’s not for you.” The RB-51 II bookshelf pair and SW-110 subwoofer retail at $920 total and are a good tonal match in the Klipsch line. The sub is spec’d at 28 Hz extension, and the bookshelf pair is designed to perform capably in both small and larger-sized rooms. Klipsch’s signature aesthetic design should blend well with a wide variety of decor.

Surround Sound 5.1 Setups

To bask in a fully enveloping aural experience, only multichannel systems can do the job. Blu-ray and DVD movies, along with a significant amount of cable TV programming, are encoded with 5.1 or higher audio, intended for the corresponding number of speakers. One notable benefit over stereo setups is that with 5.1 the dialog is isolated to the center channel speaker while with stereo it is phased between the two fronts, potentially compromising speech clarity. The main downside to 5.1 setups is their large footprint; 6 speakers demands a lot of room and wire-running, both in front of and behind the viewing area. If you don’t have the layout to accommodate this – or the support of your wife or significant other – it might be best to stick with a stereo setup. Finally, as with the stereo setups above, external amplification is required (recommendations provided at the end).

1. Infinity TSS-1200 – $500 – 800

Infinity is a subsidiary of the Harmon Kardon consortium, and at this price point, this one’s a no-brainer. The speakers are relatively compact, can be wall-mounted and even includes stands and wall brackets (which usually must be purchased separately). The included sub is of medium size, weighing in at 44 lbs. with a 12” driver – not something normally found at this price point. While the Infinity won’t offer the clarity or accuracy of higher-priced systems, it’s one of the best entry-level surround packages on the market. This unit tends to sell out quickly when it’s being offered at lower prices, but if you’re vigilant, this is one system that puts the typical home theater in a box (HTiB) offerings to shame.

2. EMP Tek Impression Series 5.1 – $1,345

EMP Tek is a powerhouse in audio circles, and this particular system is their mid-range package. Unlike the Infinity system above which uses bookshelf style speakers, the EMP Tek uses the floorstanding variety. As you might guess, they’re taller and intended to be placed on the floor. The sub uses a 250W amp and is capable of 35Hz response, allowing for seamless crossover between the low frequencies and the accompanying speakers. The EMP Tek systems are universally lauded for their disproportionate price : performance ratio and are thus a great option for novices and audio enthusiasts alike.

AV Receiver

The receiver (or AVR) is the brains of your home theater, the hub to which all your devices connect. Your video components (e.g., cable box, game console, DVD/BD player) and each of your speakers connect directly to the receiver, allowing a single HDMI cable to be run from the AVR to your HDTV. This is the standard connection protocol if all of your input devices use HDMI (or, alternatively, if your AVR supports analog-to-HDMI conversion).

Even if you’re not looking to purchase an external sound system, AVRs can be a highly justifiable investment for their assortment of inputs. Most HDTVs include a limited number of HDMI and other inputs, while AVRs typically contain 3 or more HDMI terminals and a bevy of analog terminals. If you have a high number of source devices, I’d recommend picking up an AVR, especially if you intend to buy a speaker setup down the road.

The type of amplifier housed in the AVR determines the amount of power it is able to draw and the ability for it to power your speakers, though most AVRs on the market are more than capable of driving the systems recommended here. While the enthusiast or audiophile would assess an AVR solely on its amp design, the average consumer is likely more concerned with niche features like iDevice and AirPlay support, DLNA support and music streaming support (e.g., Pandora). The brands below get my top honors.

1. Pioneer VSX-50 – $600

I’ve owned two Pioneer AVRs now, both of which have worked flawlessly since day one. I chose this specific model in their latest Elite line because it’s likely to satisfy the vast majority of users out there. It has 4 HDMI inputs, can be used with up to 7.1 channel systems and has 3D support. For the Apple enthusiast, it can wirelessly stream audio from your iPod, iPhone and iPad via Airplay at the touch of a button. DLNA sync is also included, allowing you to stream music stored on your PC, complete with album art pushed to your HDTV. Using Pioneer’s own iControlAV2 app for Android and iOS, you can also control the AVR entirely from your phone. Best of all, it has Pioneer’s proprietary auto-calibration feature which algorithmically optimizes your system for your listening environment. Compared with manual calibration, it is delightfully effective. Considering all the features and functionality, along with its aesthetic appeal, Pioneer clearly sits at the top of the receiver arena.

2. Marantz NR1602 – $650

Having been around since the 1970s, Marantz is a well-established name among audiophiles. Fortunately for the less hardcore consumer, their products are also decently affordable. The NR1602, like the Pioneer above, includes 4 HDMI inputs, along with 7.1, 3D and AirPlay support out of the box. It also is capable of streaming Pandora, Rhapsody and Napster over your home network. Marantz has its own version of auto-calibration courtesy of Audyssey, allowing for seamless plug-n-play entertainment. Another differentiating aspect here is its relatively slim profile, allowing it to fit into places more bulkier AVRs cannot.

How many of you are using TV speakers only? Are you looking to upgrade your audio soon? What do you look for most in an AV receiver?

External Link: CES Show Report January 2012

 
 
In a post last week, I wrote that for much of the U.S., the the large-screen HDTV is no longer the primary window to our digital world. More and more, consumers are choosing mobile devices and PCs as their preferred viewing device, compounding the problems the flat panel market is presently facing. Now a new report by Accenture lends further credence to this trend.

Their 2011 international survey found that the 18-34 age group is less likely to own a television than those aged 35-55+. Accordingly, the results show that a third of people now watch shows and movies on their PC and 10% on their tablet or smartphone in an average week. Another related and revealing statistic is that the percentage of consumers who regularly watch cable or traditional broadcast TV has declined by 23% since 2009.

There’s a few caveats to account for before attempting to parse out conclusions. First, the data does not identify the portion of the population who has their PC or mobile device connected to their television, which many do to enlarge the video size.1 Presumably, this portion is pooled together with the respective non-television categories. From a materiality standpoint, this might not affect the data too heavily, as this practice is mostly isolated to the tech savvy crowd. Few people on the street could even begin to explain to you what ‘HDMI mirroring’ is. Further, for many households, the PC is often prohibitively distant from the HDTV, disallowing this option.

Another, potentially more problematic, caveat here is that the survey makes no mention of the proportion of video consumed on various devices. Sure, 10% might watch a show or movie once a week on their mobile device, but how much do they watch on their large screen at home? I watch several shows a week on my smartphone but, proportionally, I watch quite a bit more on the plasma at home. Again, none of these options seem like mutually exclusive alternatives to me, but I’d like to know how well I correlate with the “average consumer.”

Lastly, the transition away from cable and broadcast programming does not necessarily imply that people are ditching their television, only altering the way content is delivered to it. It’s no secret that ever since Internet-sourced media came to the fore, cable and broadcast viewership has monotonically declined. Indeed, Accenture’s latest survey shows the largest movement yet in that direction. After all, most of the popular content formerly isolated to cable programming can now be found online using various streaming services. Roku, Boxee, Sony Netbox and Google TV devices and the Xbox 360 and PS3 game consoles are all equipped to push this content to your television. Many households may have simply swapped one set-top box for another. The report is absent on these alternative methods of video delivery. A statistic that distinguishes between the percentage of viewing per device might more precisely illustrate a shift away from television and toward more portable electronics.

With these cautions in tow, we can proceed to identify some industry signals reflected in the survey’s results. It’s self-evident that most people watching cable and broadcast (OTA) programming are doing so on a television. Equally evident is its deep correlation with age demographics. Sure enough, a quick glance at the chart below shows a greater percentage of smartphone ownership among the 18-34 crowd than the 35-55+ crowd. This tells us the baby boomer generation is traditionally more resistant to technological change, and thus cable and broadcast content on a television will likely continue to serve as their sole mechanism for media consumption.

But let’s examine the statistic that the 18-34 segment is less likely to own a television. As I discussed last week, online video consumption has skyrocketed the last two years, conveniently coinciding with the rising popularity of smartphones and tablets. Early on, the majority of smartphone traffic was short, 3 minutes or less, videos on YouTube or shared socially. Now, the presence of larger and higher quality screens has led to greater acceptance of watching movies and shows on mobile devices, something anathematized by purists and filmmakers just a couple years ago. Watching Avatar on an iPad is actually a very pleasant and enjoyable experience. Based on Accenture’s report, this practice is growing quickly and will continue to as the mobile market is further saturated.

Another statistic drives home this point. The survey also asked respondents whether they were likely to purchase an HDTV in 2012. Only 20% answered yes, down 5% from 2010. You could certainly attribute these numbers partly to market saturation or a faltering economy. It’s true a flat panel television is not replaced as swiftly as other, less expensive electronic products, and consumers may be currently more averse to discretionary spending. Yet the dominance of other devices in terms of video traffic cannot be understated. At least in much of the developed world, the HDTV is now supplementary to the PC, tablet and smartphone, as the findings here reveal a rapidly growing trend away from large-screen viewing. Just as the earlier generations have clung to the television and avoided forays into the mobile space, the later generations prefer mobile. As these diametrical generations shift proportionally, so will the trends.

TV No Longer a Group Experience?

While some may write these statistics off as nothing more than a natural trajectory of technological shifting, it seems to me these trends connote an underlying, more fundamental trend, one rooted in social signals. Since the inception of the television, watching TV has been almost exclusively a group or communal activity. The entertainment experience was traditionally enjoyed with friends and family. Today, watching TV is more of a solo activity. Day to day, how much content do you watch with other people compared with the amount you watch on a personal device, be it a laptop, smartphone or tablet?

Those devices are more popular choices not merely because they are more accessible and portable. They are also more functional and more personalized. Consider everything you can do on a phone or tablet that you cannot do on a television – browse the Internet, use social media, make voice calls, video chat, listen to music. If there’s an app for it, you can probably do it.

A study by Ericsson Consumer Lab, titled “TV & Video Consumer Trend Report 2011,” reported that consumers are already doing all of these things while watching TV. How much longer until we remove the HDTV from our digital carousel altogether? Social media in particular has greatly impacted the TV experience, with over 40% claiming to browse and update their social network feeds while watching TV.

HDTV manufacturers are trying to integrate many of these features into their sets by including social media apps and even internal web browsers. But it will take a few years for them to get it right, and by then it might be too late. Or it might not matter at all. Younger consumers find the laptop-smartphone combo plenty suitable. The only element absent is a large screen, but this is an acceptable trade-off for the functional, especially personal, value that more connected devices provide.

Consider this: it used to be enough to simply have a TV and a computer. Now everyone seems to have a computer, smartphone and, to a lesser but fractional extent, a tablet. The flat panel has seemingly been relegated to optional status. With all the electronic purchases one must make these days, will the television be left behind? Will consumers stop buying large-screen televisions for their living rooms and instead watch everything on laptops and mobile devices? The data from this survey clearly suggest this is already the case for younger demographics.

If we take the long view, then, it might indeed appear the flat panel market is irrevocably doomed. More and more of our life is spent online, and we expect our electronic devices to stay fully synchronized with our digital self. The ubiquity of social media and other popular Internet services have given rise to a more peripatetic, hyper-mobilized entertainment experience, where the ability to multi-task is of paramount importance. We expect to watch a show of our choosing, check our social media profile, and listen to a song, all from the same device. At present, PCs, smartphones and tablets bring us closer to this desired symbiosis than do HDTVs. While I’d like to believe there will always be a place for the television, it’s becoming clearer that tough times lie ahead for the industry.

More troubling, perhaps, is that this more personalized culture is also slowly de-emphasizing shared viewing. Will the entertainment experience one day be an entirely private affair?

Your thoughts? Are you starting to spend more time in front a mobile or laptop screen than a large screen HDTV? Do you frequently watch movies and shows on your tablet or smartphone? Do you agree or disagree that the community aspect of watching TV is slowly being lost? Let me know in the comments.

External Link: The 2012 Accenture Consumer Electronics Products and Services Usage Report

Feature image via 148apps.com

1. Editor Note: Assuming your PC and TV are within close proximity, you can link the two with an HDMI cable (PCs) or a DisplayPort- or DVI-to-HDMI adapter (Macs).

 
 
HDTVs used to find their way into just about every conversation on consumer electronics. In fact, there was a point in the not too distant past when the flat panel television was the juggernaut of the tech industry, synonymous with January’s CES, the quintessential purchase for most households. Each successive generation of LCD and plasma models galvanized consumers with their marked improvements in picture quality and physical dimensions.

Yet in recent years, its status has been increasingly hushed due to the inexorable rise of tablets and smartphones as well as the diminishing returns characteristic of advances in picture quality and panel thickness. Statistically, consumers are transitioning to newer mechanisms of media delivery and have not been swayed by manufacturers’ attempts at winning them back. Are entries in the HDTV product segment no longer materially or meaningfully differentiable? Or more poignantly, has the flair and excitement of the conventional television worn thin?

Rise of the HDTV

Back when I attended college, circa 2004, HDTVs were all the rage. Sure, they had been around (mostly in plasma form) since the late 1990s, but their prohibitively high price point meant they would occupy the minority of market share for the next few years. CRT televisions, the bulky, mostly analog devices of yesteryear that were colloquially referred to as “tube TVs”, were still found in most homes in the U.S. and abroad.

Prior to mass adoption of flat panel sets, a few big-name manufacturers gave CRTs the HD treatment, producing high definition widescreen displays in both direct-view and rear-projection form. However, the visual requirements for HD were found to be practically incompatible with CRT’s primarily analog nature. First, high-definition imagery, precisely defined as a minimum of 720 vertical lines and 480 horizontal lines of resolution, is best appreciated at larger screen sizes. This created an intractable problem for CRT producers as CRT sets were already heavy and unwieldy. Direct-view CRTs larger than 30 inches could easily weigh a couple hundred pounds and were prone to a whole catalog of abnormalities given the more precise mechanics of HD rendering.

The most popular HD CRTs were those carrying Sony’s Trinitron label, though their development was stymied by the allure of thinner screens. Sensing the consumer shift in preference and realizing that CRTs were approaching the limits of manufacturing practicality, Sony abruptly ended CRT production to focus exclusively on LCD technology. While the image quality and motion performance produced by these high-definition CRTs were quite good and arguably better overall than the flat panel offerings at the time, the technology was structurally unsuited for high-definition and was rapidly displaced by the impending flat panel revolution.

Consumers much preferred flat screens, anyway. Transportation and installation were no longer operose affairs. Flat panels could be effortlessly mounted for a more classy, finished look. Techheads everywhere strived to impress their friends and neighbors with the thinnest television out at the time. The transition from HD to “Full HD”  (or 1080p) gave buyers yet another reason to trade up and purchase new arrays of compatible equipment. More advanced features baked into LCDs continually improved motion and contrast performance, bringing them closer to the level of plasma technology, which has historically performed higher in those areas.

More important for the manufacturers, the HDTV era ushered in a long-awaited influx of business and excitement for the industry. The average household may have held on to their CRT television for well over a decade, despite the release of a new model each year. Now consumers were purchasing HD sets en masse to replace each of their less “wife-friendly” CRT precursors. What’s more, there were not yet disruptive technologies on the market to cannibalize sales from the HDTV segment. For many years, the flat panel was the primary means of media delivery to people around the developed world.

The Post-HDTV Era

If we conduct a market appraisal given today’s conditions, however, the landscape has changed considerably and surely has the disposition of television manufacturers. More and more video is being consumed on the PC, and viewing is much more fragmented, owing to the disruptive technologies that have emerged in the form of tablets, smartphones and e-readers. The large flat screen is no longer the central hub of the entertainment experience around which viewers revolve, but one of many courses in the buffet of digital media devices.

Meanwhile, HDTV manufacturers experienced steep profit declines in 2011. Both Sony and Samsung reported a decrease in year-over-year sales in 2011 arising from “deteriorating market conditions in the U.S. and Europe.” This is what you’d expect now that the flat panel install base exceeds 50-60% in the developed nations of U.S., Japan and Europe. Globally, the situation looks less dim due to the emerging markets in China, Latin America and India, but what is especially clear among developed regions is that consumers are not lining up to secure every product refresh.

Smart TV, 3D TV and Beyond

The “Smart TV”, a moniker used to describe televisions that support Internet-enabled media, was the inevitable first response to a consumer base who now expected a more connected digital ecosystem. Unsurprisingly, the addition of streaming media hasn’t propelled sales figures like manufacturers had hoped, largely because this content can be accessed via several other devices consumers already own.

The bulk of Netflix and Hulu traffic is sourced from PC connections, while mobile video consumption (which comprises smartphones and tablets) has exploded in the last two years. Popular TV series and movies are now being enjoyed on more portable devices. For much of the U.S.,  the HDTV is no longer the primary window into our digital world. Repeat HDTV sales are an unreasonable expectation when other conduits of digital media have been deemed perfectly acceptable by the mainstream install base.

Stereoscopic support (or 3D) represents another effort to reclaim former sales volumes. The predominant argument against 3D in the past has been the lack of content, but that chicken or egg problem has largely resolved itself. Each of the primary pay-TV operators offers multiple channels with 3D programming, though admittedly there is little worth watching. There are nearly 100 titles available in the Blu-ray 3D format. Sony has even commercialized a PS3-branded 3D display to recoup its massive end-to-end investments in the 3D marketplace.

Yet according to NPD Display Search’s latest report, 3D TVs represent just 8% of North American unit sales. This tells us that those who are buying new televisions are not swayed by the (optional) 3D support, despite the fact that the feature does not command a substantial premium (if one at all) over 2D models.

At this point, the causal link might seem clear: consumers are spending their money on the latest gadgets instead of buying a newer HDTV. But is there another, more fundamental issue at hand?

Are We Bored of TV?

Not by what’s on the TV, mind you, but by TVs themselves. Have we reached the upper echelon of display performance, where the law of diminishing returns has created an atmosphere of disinterest among consumers? Has panel design and performance reached a dead end? More to the point, is any TV today good enough?

Take panel thickness, for example. I remember awhile back a plasma television at CES that was just 9mm thick. I tracked it down, and it turns out it was a Pioneer plasma from 2008. Note that 9mm is just over 5/15 of an inch. At CES just this month, LG debuted a 55-inch OLED display that’s just 3/16 of an inch thick.

Who cares?

Certainly there was value in reducing panel depth from 2 feet to 5 inches, as it allowed you to fit the TV in spaces that weren’t possible before. But there is almost no added value in reducing thickness from 3 inches to under 1 inch. Somehow I don’t find it plausible when the Wall Street Journal reports that TV manufacturers will attempt to score higher sales with thinner sets.

What about better picture quality? Won’t people pay more for that?

Perhaps there is no greater market cue than the demise of Pioneer’s flat-panel division in 2009. The singular focus of the legendary Kuro project, which gestated objectively the best consumer-grade display devices by a wide margin, was to produce the deepest black levels of any display to date; everything else was subordinate. The Kuro plasma panels would undoubtedly be considered bare-bones by today’s standards, with no “smart TV” support and limited A/V inputs. Yet Pioneer believed that the quality of the on-screen image would be paramount in consumer’s purchasing minds. It wasn’t, and the Kuro’s relatively exorbitant price tag did not find economic favor in the industry, forcing Pioneer to pursue more profitable product segments in lieu of pursuing what they were inarguably the best at.

Truthfully, there were many peripheral reasons for Pioneer’s departure. Poor marketing; an excessively high price point; the fact that typical big-box showrooms were unsuitable for demoing its superior image quality. But the underlying cause is that the majority of the market found other options more than adequate. The three years the Kuro line was on the market were the same three years that overall industry sales soared.

As plasma and LCD sets approach maturity, are there any more meaningful gains to be made?

If you were to subjectively assess a random sample of today’s big-name flat panels, irrespective of display technology, you’d likely find the differences in contrast, color, grayscale and other picture parameters negligible or only noticeable under precise lighting conditions. While for the average consumer it was generally true that most displays were “good enough”, this now seems to be true for all but the most hardcore enthusiasts. Now that LCD and plasma performance have converged with regard to nearly every specification, you really can’t go wrong with today’s selection.

The science behind display resolution provides a useful illustration here. When the market transitioned from standard-definition to high-definition displays, even the layman consumer could easily resolve the difference. Today, 1080p is the new standard for large-screen TVs and, particularly at certain screen size-viewing distance scenarios, already exceeds the margins of human visual acuity.

Perceptually, the gap in resolvable detail between standard-definition (480i/p) and HD (720p) is far greater than the jump from 720p to 1080p. For the average living room, anything beyond 1080p increasingly falls prey to the law of diminishing returns. Again, does anybody care about higher resolutions such as 2k and 4k or infinitesimal reductions in black level for future generations of televisions?

What’s Ahead?

OLED offers a potentially optimistic future for television manufacturers, as it effectively combines the best attributes of LCD and plasma display technology. The first large-screen OLEDs are rumored to be released by the end of this year. One estimate for the aforementioned 55-inch OLED by LG puts the sticker price at $8,000. However, plasma and LCD tech has come so far that the increase in image quality OLED provides is decidedly smaller than previous advances in picture performance. If HDTV buyers aren’t willing to pay extra for material differences in display quality, why think they will for marginal ones?

Now that HDTVs must share the spotlight with more convenient and functional devices, manufacturers have a rocky road ahead of them. Tablets and smartphones are currently more popular choices for viewing the content we care about, and HDTV appears to have taken a secondary role. Videophiles and early adopters will undoubtedly continue to spring for the latest and greatest, but the non-bleeding edge consumer base has already spoken with their wallets. The heavily rumored shutdown of the annual CES, an industry trade show with a hardware focus, won’t help the flat panel segment, either. As disheartening as it is to hear, the flat panel arena seems headed toward a period characterized by more consolidation and less innovation.

What do readers think? When was your last HDTV purchase? What is your primary device for watching TV and movies? Is there anything compelling right now or down the road that has convinced you to upgrade your current HDTV? Do you think the industry will recover with OLED and other innovations?

 
 
Microsoft’s Research (MSR) division is pushing to establish a new WiFi architecture, dubbed WiFi-NC, that marshals existing WiFi spectrum with the unused spectrum between television broadcasts (called “white space”). Tapping into these lower frequency bands provides a more potent wireless signal, resulting in fewer dropouts and more consistent connection speeds. WiFi-NC is 100% backward compatible with existing WiFi architecture, making it a more attractive option than other initiatives in recent years. Developing this idea given the current infrastructure was not too difficult; the dicier issue is convincing Congress to play ball.

Interference over WiFi connections is annoyingly common and manifests itself in the form of reduced network speeds or a complete drop of the WiFi link. Depending on where your wireless router or other wireless access point is located in your house/apartment/dorm in relation to your wireless devices, dropouts may be a frequent occurrence. It can be especially frustrating when you’re streaming from Netflix or some other media service. High-population areas, such as high-rise apartment buildings and college dormitories, tend to suffer disruptions the most. WiFi interference is caused chiefly by channel congestion:

• Wireless access points in close proximity set to identical or overlapping traffic channels or
• Too many wireless access points in a concentrated area

Current WiFi architecture also limits signal propagation to the tens of meters and has difficulty passing through certain materials such as thick concrete walls. Conversely, television transmissions can travel tens of miles to be picked up by your over-the-air (OTA) antenna and penetrate numerous building structures along the way.

Microsoft’s WiFi-NC aims to compensate for these limitations by appropriating the currently off-limits white space spectrum. When terrestrial television transitioned from analog to digital transmission, unused slices of the spectrum were left behind. These segments are highly desirable because television broadcasts occupy the “radio waves” portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, while WiFi occupies the “microwaves” portion of the spectrum. Lower frequency radiation (radio waves) better penetrates the concrete walls of buildings and travel greater distances and speeds than higher frequency radiation (microwaves).

To deliver a superior experience than current WiFi architecture provides, Microsoft’s technology would use the best combination of the available spectrum to optimize the connection quality of all users. A WiFi-NC access point could switch on-the-fly to the narrow white space frequencies when interference or other drop in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is detected.

It should be noted that WiFi-NC won’t automatically increase data rates above what’s currently specified in the current set of wireless b/g/n standards. Rather, the technology will enable a more consistent connection at the speeds for which your network is capable, even for the fastest of WiFi networks which can achieve 1 gigabit per second data transfers. Thus its core competency lies in its more efficient use of spectrum to deliver a full-purpose signal and more consistent wireless connections.

The bad news is prior to implementation, Microsoft must be given the green light from Congress, who has resisted apportioning white space spectrum due to concerns over interference. Microsoft and other groups have petitioned the FCC to release this space before, claiming the current rules are too conservative, but the FCC has repeatedly denied these requests in an attempt to protect television transmissions from interference.

In response, a Microsoft research team proved that an HD movie stream could be transmitted over white space spectrum to deliver broadband wireless signals on the same channel as a wireless microphone (which occupies frequencies very close to TV broadcasts) without any noticeable degradation in sound quality. Regardless, current legislation upholds that “white space devices must avoid any channel in use by a wireless microphone as well as the channels on either side of a TV broadcast.”

Microsoft sees no reason for spectrum to go unused and wants to create (and likely patent) a new wireless standard, superseding 802.11n. Adoption of the new standard would require a new router or other wireless access point, but beyond that, the design is fully compatible with legacy standards and could run alongside existing networks. If the rules were to change in the future and Congress passes the appropriate legislation, WiFi-NC could be implemented immediately. Its more robust architecture would result in better, more stable connections for WiFi users.

External Link: Microsoft Reinvents Wi-Fi for White Spaces

The clever hack demonstrated in the video above allows passive 3D displays to render fullscreen views for each player in a splitscreen session. This allows both players to enjoy the entire screen area (albeit in 2D only), removing the ability for you or your friend to screen watch. The best part about this hack is that you only need a few items to make it work.

To recreate this effect for yourself, you need:

• Passive 3D TV
• 2 pairs of polarized glasses
• PS3 or Xbox 360 game with 3D capability and split-screen game mode(s)

How does it work?

You simply pop out the lenses in the passive glasses and place the two L lenses in one pair and the R lenses in the other. Now that the lenses match with respect to polarity, you then enable the appropriate 3D modes on both your 3D TV and in the game. It’s that simple.

Call of Duty: Black Ops supports the Top-Bottom 3D format, as do nearly all 3D sets. (Note: Top-Bottom may also be designated ‘Over-Under’ or ‘Above-Below’.) The PS3 console supports a variety of 3D formats, including Top-Bottom, Side-by-Side and Frame Packing, but most PS3 titles to date use Top-Bottom for 3D rendering. The important thing is that both your 3D TV and game match according to 3D mode.

Passive 3D sets typically come with 2-4 pairs of polarized glasses, but if you need some, you can also use the ones from theaters – if you choose not to return them at the end of the presentation. If not, they are very cheap in comparison to active shutter eyewear.

While the X360 does not “officially” support stereoscopic 3D, the console’s hardware is fully capable of rendering 3D gameplay which matches or exceeds the quality of PS3’s S3D output. The 360 does not have as many 3D-compatible titles as PS3 right now, but if you have one, such as Crysis 2, along with a passive 3D set, the effect will work precisely the same way. Simply enable Top-Bottom or Side-by-Side in the game menu and on your 3D TV.

Downsides

Since this hack reverts gameplay to a single view for each player, the 3D effect is lost. The same is true for active 3D implementations, such as Sony’s SimulView. There is no (cost-efficient) way to achieve this effect and 3D simultaneously on a single display.

I should mention that the resolution loss inherent to passive 3D sets will be exacerbated by this hack. For example, let’s take the game used in the video. Call of Duty: Black Ops is rendered on PS3 at a resolution of 960 x 544, which will be scaled to the resolution output you have selected in your PS3’s video settings. In 2D mode, this full resolution is displayed. In 3D mode, however, vertical resolution is halved as a byproduct of polarization, leaving each eye with 960 x 272 pixels of information. By interchanging the lenses as in the video, there are no longer two views later combined by the brain but just one view: a 960 x 272 frame stretched across the area of your display. The end result is certainly not pretty, particularly on a 50″ screen, but mileage may vary as it depends on your screen size-viewing distance setup. And, ultimately, the appeal of this might depend on how much you are enjoying capping your friend who can no longer screen watch to get an edge.

Of note is that the X360 version of Black Ops is rendered slightly higher at 1040 x 608, but this minor increase won’t make the extreme slice in resolution any less palpable.

Sony SimulView

I think it was largely because of this video and its viral effect that led to Sony’s implementation in its active shutter 3D sets. At the moment, Sony’s PS3-branded 3D display is the only active 3D TV with this feature, which Sony has dubbed SimulView. Its “quad speed frame-sequential display technology” essentially alters the way the separate views are transmitted by sending two side by side 2D images, one for each player. The effect is enabled by pressing a button on the top of the glasses. The prime advantage active has over passive in this case is that each player receives full 2D resolution. It’s not halved as in passive sets, where the loss is more pronounced due to the single, uncombined view.

It’s not all perfect, however. Sony only sells a single, 24” model, and it only ships with one pair of glasses. Additional eyewear is around $70. But perhaps the biggest drawback is that games must specifically support this feature, rendering all preexisting titles incompatible unless an update is issued.

I’m sure we’ll see this feature implemented in more active shutter sets down the road (assuming the Sony sells well), but for now, it’s easy to recreate the effect on all passive 3D sets.

For more information on the differences between active and passive 3D technology: The 3D TV War: Which One Should You Buy?

 
 
Here’s the situation: you’ve just bought a new flat-panel HDTV. You connect it to the latest Blu-ray player, power it on, and watch expectantly as its first images appear on the screen. Only, you notice the image doesn’t look right. Faces look sunburned, unnatural, and everything looks too bright. The black level you heard so much about looks much grayer than you had hoped for. That razor thin bezel aside, the image quality does not seem commensurate to your monetary outlay. You’re disappointed.

You’re also not alone.

Contrary to widespread assumption, your HDTV does not look its best out of the box. Manufacturers of flat-panel televisions do not fine-tune each display to look its best in a home environment, but rather to outperform competing displays in the showrooms. And those showroom presets don’t have the same appeal in the home, resulting in the highly unflattering imagery you see when first hitting the power button. The reality is that it’s impossible to untap your HDTV’s true potential without adjusting it from its default settings. As we will see, the difference can be quite remarkable.

Even if you’ve not paid much attention to televisions, you’re probably aware of the tricks retailers use to steer customers toward particular products and get your attention. The sets at big-box retailers are commonly configured to “torch mode” — otherwise known as “burn your retina mode” — where contrast and brightness are exaggerated in an effort to draw in the consumer. While the brightest set tends to win over the most customers, the showroom floor represents a decidedly atypical viewing scenario. Put simply, this is not the environment in which the display will be placed at home. Your HDTV will likely not have to do war with a surfeit of fluorescent lighting, and thus should not be driven with the same settings as a showroom model.

What’s wrong with factory settings?

The ultimate purpose of adjusting your television is to reproduce as closely as possible the intent of the creator of whatever content you’re viewing. What you see on your screen should closely approximate what the director, post-production engineers and visual artists at Warner Bros., Paramount, and HBO saw in their editing studio. The monitors used in post-production, for the most part, adhere to specific industry standards for color, black level, grayscale, gamma and image proportions. For example, all movies released on the DVD and Blu-ray Disc formats are originally mastered in light-controlled studios on standardized display devices. While you can’t mirror the exact displays and viewing rooms the studios use, you can adjust your television to mirror those reference standards.

Therein lies the fundamental dilemma for consumers. The default settings on consumer-grade HDTVs are usually so far removed from content standards that you are not seeing what was intended. TVs in “torch mode,” besides being way too bright for most viewing environments, exhibit washed out detail and elicit an altogether unnatural image. (This artificial nature of default settings is usually most discernible in a dark room.) What’s more, viewing an overly bright display in a dim to dark environment can lead to viewing fatigue and visual discomfort. At bottom, an unadjusted display distorts creator intent and hampers the viewing experience, and this distortion can only be reliably avoided by emulating professional practice.

Let’s take a closer look at this disconnect between reference and consumer level reproduction. The two images below are freeze frames from the Blu-ray Disc version of The Fighter displayed on my calibrated Pioneer KRP-500M plasma monitor (ISF modes activated), which I purchased after the unfortunate demise of Pioneer’s HDTV division. The frames were captured with a Canon XSI in a light-controlled room. Due to the inevitable non-uniformity present in any imaging chain (and in particular the amount of ambient light present; again, the images are intended for dark-room viewing), you probably are not seeing the unadulterated image, but the differences should still be quite palpable. Click to enlarge.
 

Default Settings – Pioneer KRP-500M plasma

Calibrated Settings – Pioneer KRP-500M plasma

What can I do about it?

Grayscale, gamma, CMS? While many of the settings in your menus can be confusing, and the rabbit hole of display calibration fairly deep, a remarkable difference in image quality can be achieved without a large investment of time and education. There are a number of approaches you can take to align your display closer to industry practice. Options range from purchasing a calibration disc, downloading test patterns via the internet, purchasing external hardware such as colorimeters and spectrophotometers, to hiring a certified calibrator to come to your home. Since the latter two can be prohibitively expensive, and using your own meters requires some advanced technical know-how, I’d recommend starting with the first two options.

Using a calibration disc or online test patterns will easily get you 85-90% of the way to industry conformity, and the learning curve is modest. With all discs and test patterns, there are a few preliminary steps you’ll want to take. Make sure the room is dark and as absent as possible of ambient light. Before you begin calibration, it’s recommended to let your display run for a minimum of 30 minutes.1 This will also allow the necessary time for your eyes to adjust to the dark environment.

The first step is to go into your settings and look for a picture mode labeled ‘Movie’, ‘Cinema’ or something similar. These presets are typically the most accurate out of the box. Some TV manufacturers (e.g., Samsung, Toshiba) will actually prompt you the first time you power on the display to choose between ‘Demo’ and ‘Home’ modes. Demo is intended for showroom floors, while Home settings will cater to the more refined lighting situations present in most living areas. This single change should immediately make your viewing experience easier on the eyes, though it won’t magically make your display 100% accurate.

Next, pop a calibration disc or thumb drive into your Blu-ray player. As with any sort of calibration activity, you need a reference to match up against, which these discs provide to enable your display to emulate industry standard. You play them just as you would a standard disc, and they typically have either on-disc or online manuals to walk you through each pattern. Like before, use your remote to adjust your TV’s settings, such as contrast, brightness, color and sharpness. A detailed explanation of these settings and other picture parameters are beyond the purview of this post, but the discs are usually accompanied by thorough explanations of what you are adjusting.

Thankfully, there are a number of quality calibration discs available today. The three mentioned below are ones I have used and recommend for their user-friendly interface and overall effectiveness.

Disney’s World of Wonder

• Most beginner-friendly
• Easy to understand tutorials of the adjustments you are making
• Includes patterns for use with and without external hardware
• Includes countless high quality clips from Disney films

Joe Kane’s Digital Video Essentials

• Average technical expertise required
• Solid background information on the hows and whys of display adjustment
• Includes patterns for use with and without external hardware

Spears & Munsil’s HD Benchmark

• Highest technical expertise required
• Highest quality test patterns
• Gorgeous intro montage
• Advanced explanations of test patterns
• Includes patterns for picture parameters than can be adjusted by eye only

 
To be clear, hiring a professional calibrator or getting your hands on a light meter and other hardware will be the surest path to optimal picture quality. A calibrator making use of this equipment allows for precise adjustments to things like grayscale, gamma, and CMS that cannot be reliably made by eye, getting you that much closer to seeing what Game of Thrones creators saw in the studio. But since the associated costs are often too much for the average consumer, this option is primarily intended for the enthusiast or someone who possesses the utmost desire for the accurate reproduction of movies and other program material.

A much more prudent option is adjusting the television yourself with the help of online resources and setup discs like those described above. Again, switching your display to ‘Cinema’ or ‘Movie’ mode is the first thing you should do and will get you in the ballpark of a reference image. You can also control the amount of ambient light in your viewing environment by making sure blinds are closed or getting black-out curtains.

With the drastic increase in picture quality brought about by the Blu-ray format and higher bit rate streams, user adjustment and calibration is more important than ever. The degree of detail and clarity offered by the latest flat panels and Blu-rays, when set up correctly, can deliver that “looking through a window” experience we often get at the local theater. There is often a transformative difference between an unadjusted and properly adjusted HDTV, and it’s one that few people realize until demonstrated to them. You paid hard-earned money for your HDTV: why not extract its ultimate potential?

1. This step is more important for plasma panels, as this allows the phosphors to settle.

 
 
Much confusion has arisen due to the recent ads by LG and others comparing their new 3D TVs to “conventional” 3D sets. Let’s be clear: there is absolutely a war among 3D television manufacturers, and it’s likely to intensify as more appealing 3D content hits the market. So what are the differences between the types of 3D displays, and more importantly, which one is better?

There are presently two types of mass-produced stereoscopic displays: those based on active shutter and those based on passive polarization technology. Both presentations artificially enhance the sense of depth in an image by delivering slightly differing views to each eye. Our brain then fuses the two images together, creating an illusion of depth. Note that all types of 3D content — including 3D Blu-ray, video games, and cable and satellite programs — are compatible with both types of 3D displays. While both formats can effectively convey a three-dimensional image, notable differences exist in how each format is perceived by the end user and in the glasses used for the respective technologies.

Active Shutter 3D

Active shutter-based televisions arrived on the market first, shortly following the massive success of James Cameron’s Avatar. These sets incorporate “shutter” glasses along with an active component, the mechanics of which are relatively simple. The display shows alternating L eye and R eye images in a rapid sequence that is synced to the glasses, which block one eye while leaving the other eye open (hence, its “shutter” designation). The sync between the display and glasses is maintained via either IR or Bluetooth, which also happens to be its biggest shortcoming.

Image via Digital Trends

As the 3D effect completely depends on the sync between the (emitter in the) display and the (receiver in the) eyewear, there is the possibility that the system will fail to maintain proper sync. Further, interoperability between other IR and Bluetooth 3D televisions and glasses continues to be a problem and will likely not be remedied until an official standard for 3D glasses is finalized.

Panasonic, Sony, LG, Samsung, and Toshiba produce active shutter displays in both LCD and plasma varieties.

Passive Polarized 3D

Televisions using polarized 3D technology require different eyewear called polarized glasses, which are passive in nature and, in principle, function just like polarized sunglasses. Polarized glasses use offsetting polarization filters in each lens that correspond to the filters applied to the surface of the television screen. As each eye only receives light that is polarized in the corresponding direction from the screen, each eye sees a different image. The biggest downside to this approach is that vertical resolution is halved as a byproduct of polarization. On the upside, any pair of polarized glasses will work with any polarized TV, and they’re much cheaper than active glasses.

LG, Vizio, and Toshiba market passive polarized displays for LCDs only.

Passive polarized TRON: Legacy Limited Edition by Oakley

So what are the practical differences between these two technologies? Each 3D display type has pros and cons, largely resulting from the glasses required to view the stereoscopic signals. We’ll break down the differences that involve the most salient considerations.

Weight

Most of the cons of shutter glasses can be traced to its active attributes. The receiver, along with the batteries required to power the glasses, add weight. This may grow uncomfortable during the span of a full-length movie and may be of considerable concern for those already wearing prescription glasses. On the other hand, polarized glasses are no heavier than standard sunglasses.

Charge Time

Active shutter glasses come in the non-rechargeable (30 – 80 hours) or rechargeable variety (2 hours). Rechargeable glasses typically top out at two hours, so it’s best to have a backup pair ready to go. Polarized glasses are entirely passive and thus have a theoretically infinite “charge time.”

Cost

Active glasses range from $50 – 250, depending on whether you buy your TV manufacturer’s glasses or 3rd party glasses (all of which vary in performance). Polarized glasses are cheap by comparison; they can be found for as low as $5. Note that polarized glasses are the same ones that are used for 3D movies in the large majority of theaters. If you’re able to make out with a pair, they’ll work just fine with your passive 3D display at home. As market saturation occurs, expect retail prices of active shutter glasses to drop considerably.

The price difference between the televisions themselves is quite small. The polarizer coating applied to passive displays adds significant cost to its production, so don’t expect passive TVs to be bargain-priced relative to its active shutter counterparts.

Picture Quality

While active shutter TVs maintain full picture information in the horizontal and vertical direction, polarized displays reduce vertical resolution by half. This effectively means a 1080p signal will be perceived as 540p per eye from a polarized display, while an active shutter system delivers full 1080p per eye. Depending on how far you are seated from the screen, this may be a noticeable or negligible trait. This is also content-dependent, as sharper content (e.g., CGI and digital animation) tends to look softer on passive displays. Eagle-eyed viewers who are familiar with good and bad image reproduction will likely notice the drop in resolution when comparing the two technologies side by side, and the disparity becomes more appreciable at suboptimal screen size-viewing distance scenarios. Note that the polarization effect does not affect 2D viewing; full 1080p is maintained in 2D mode.

Crosstalk

Crosstalk – the imperfect separation between the L/R eye images – occurs when one eye sees parts of an image intended for the other eye. This happens due to limitations or deficiencies existing in the display, the glasses or even in the source itself. If it’s present in the movie’s encoding itself, for example, it will be visible with every pair of glasses. Crosstalk can occur in LCDs if the liquid crystals do not switch quickly enough from bright to dark or vice versa and in plasma panels if the phosphor compounds have an afterglow that lasts too long.

While both display types can exhibit this artifact, generally, higher quality displays and glasses will mitigate crosstalk that is otherwise not present in the source. For active shutter implementations, plasma has been shown to exhibit less crosstalk than LCD.

Viewing Angles

While both active and passive possess wide horizontal viewing angles—meaning you and all your friends on the couch can see a coherent 3D image—only active boasts equally accommodating vertical viewing angles. All this means is that if you choose passive, you must ensure the television screen is angled toward your head. If mounting your screen, ensure it’s tilted down toward the viewing positions. Otherwise, the image will break apart and your friends will go home. Keep in mind that fairly marked differences exist among glasses. Crosstalk and brightness can vary along with horizontal viewing angles depending on which glasses you use.

Light Attenuation

The eyewear associated with both technologies reduces light output significantly. Total light loss is as much a function of the display technology as the specific glasses used; each combination of television and glasses is unique. Some 3D displays will auto-adjust brightness when engaging 3D mode. Thus, there is no clear winner here. If you notice the image is too dim when slipping on the glasses, you should boost the brightness on your television. Optimally, you’d have separate settings for 3D and 2D viewing to avoid constantly manipulating your display settings.

Those are the facts. Polarized 3D is lighter, thinner, cheaper and less error-prone, but cuts resolution in half. Active 3D preserves full picture detail, resulting in an overall higher quality 3D picture, but can have syncing and interoperability issues. If you’re a plasma fan, then active shutter is your only choice at this time. Remember, all 3D TVs can also be used to view standard 2D material. But in case you decide to watch some 3D content down the road, be sure to choose the technology that best suits your viewing environment, preferences and budget.

Image courtesy of Panasonic Viera

For those who would like even more in-depth information, Raymond Soneira has a top-rate feature at 3D TV Display Technology Shoot-Out.

Who has a 3D TV and what type? For potential buyers, which type more appeals to you?

Feature image via Cnet