The Retail Story Begins: First Consumer HDTV Display Reviewed at Audio King (Part 2)

by Bruce Jacobs, KTCA
Saturday, August 15, 1998

Part 2
They showed the "split" mode which is a squashed picture next to a differentsquashed picture and your pick of audio. Perhaps this will be as unsuccessful as PIP? They showed the "memo" mode which allows saving a half-dozen stills, so you can go back and read the phone number for the vegomatic or pledge drive opportunity. They showed the "catch-up" mode which records 1 frame per second of video and all off the audio, and allows you to come back and play the stills and sped-up audio to catch up to the program. I'd rather wait for the MPEG hard drive in the set top, which could time-shift all the video instead of just 1 fps stills. They showed it playing a 16:9 Waterworld DVD which looked good. By this time, the lady behind me was murmuring "where's the HDTV?".

They rolled the Panasonic HD-D5 2000 VTR with 1080i content of Nagono Olympics, baseball, and all of the Panasonic geisha/rolling balls/forest segment which is the most challenging material that I have seen for testing detail in HD. There were oohs and aahs from the audience. None-the-less, I would say that the display looks over-enhanced, with visible white edges on sharp black-to-gray image edges. I also saw some aliasing in 1080i, which puzzles me since I don't know where it would be coming from.

This display has far less than true HD resolution. The detailed grass and leaves that I know so well from the Panasonic tape were not nearly as sharp as I have observed on Panasonic's $40,000 reference monitor. With my recent experience seeing this tape converted to component digital 480i and then back to 1080i for display, I don't think that this consumer display will be able to show much, if any, difference between real HDTV and upconverted 480i. I'd love to see a test of this.

Panasonic intends this TV to be used alone for NTSC, DVD and DBS, or in conjunction with their upcoming $1,700 DTV set-top which Audio King maintains is available now by special order. The set top will do only the DTV reception, and will output 1080i from 1080i broadcasts, 480p from 720p and 480p broadcasts, and 480i (I think) from 480i broadcasts.

The Audio King guy said that the first Mitsubishi set top and the second-generation Panasonic set top will instead output 1080i from 720p broadcasts. Audio King will be showing Mitsubishi and Proscan HDTV displays by October. Sony will only offer an all-in-one 36" CRT DTV initially, for around ten grand, which the Audio King guy thinks is a mistake.

In summary, I found it striking how little public interest resulted from such a highly promoted showing of HDTV, and was not surprised that the first display being promoted for DTV use makes pictures significantly better than current NTSC large-screen TV's, but a far cry from true HDTV resolution.