Gene Frantz
TI Principal Fellow and Business Development Manager, DSP

I’m an early adopter. Partly because it’s my job to be familiar with what the latest and greatest applications are, but mostly because I love cool toys. Who doesn’t?

Case in point: I installed a new home theater in my house several years ago. I had a hard decision to make: How much to spend on the projector? At the time, 720p projectors were in excess of $10K and 480p projectors were under $5K. So, I chose to spend my money on better sound and seating and getting the 480p DLP® projector.

That was four years ago, and I still have my 480p projector and love it. I seem to be the only person I know who notices the pixels (I have a 12-foot screen). Everyone else is amazed at the size and brightness of the screen. I made this decision based on a study I remember from many years ago.

It seems that in the early days of HDTV investigation, someone did a study to determine the value of a better picture. They took two identical TVs, but with one left it with normal manorial sound and the other with stereo high-fidelity sound. They then asked a focus group to determine which TV had the best picture. It was unanimous that the TV with the stereo sound had the best picture.

So now I use a secret weapon when I see the pixels - I turn up the volume on my sound system. Yes, it works. But my wife always asks me to turn it back down and some times I do.

I tell this story to help in the understanding that there is more to HDTV than the number of pixels in the picture. It’s vital that manufacturers implementing HD understand this as well. There is a lot of hype surrounding HD and I hope over the next few blogs to cut through this hype and talk about the realities of what is necessary for various applications, including video conferencing, video security and IP set-top boxes.

To do this, I’ve enlisted the help of a good friend and colleague, Jeremiah Golston. I’ve known Jeremiah for many years. He is our top systems expert on digital video. He architected the C64x™ generation of devices and has been the driver of our DaVinci technology. I am pleased to let him spend the next several blogs talking about DTV, HDTV and when to do what with them.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 21st, 2006 at 8:31 am and is filed under DSP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.