Jeremiah Golston
Chief Technical Officer, TI Streaming Media

Before we dive headlong into a discussion of HD and what it means to designers today, it would be instructive to start at the beginning with a quick recap of how we got here. What has been the driver for HD?

The original push for HD came as a result of widescreen movies. Ironically, these widescreen formats were introduced by movie makers as a direct response to the threat of television in the 1950s (think Cinemascope). The movie studios wanted to offer a viewing experience that couldn’t be duplicated on the tube. Anyone who has watched at home a non-letterboxed version of movies from this era – like Ben Hur – knows that much of the picture is lost when translated to a traditional 4×3 aspect ratio. An editing method known as pan and scan has to be used to crop the images. This holds true for most movies to date not filmed in a digital format.

The first HDTV technology was also developed for movies. In the late 1970s, Sony and NHK developed NHK Hi-vision, which was able to produce images with the same quality as 35-mm film. In the 1980s, interest began to build for the development of an HDTV system for commercial broadcast that would have roughly twice the number of vertical and horizontal lines compared to conventional broadcast systems.

HD offers the ability to increase the definition per unit area and also to expand the percentage of the visual field contained by the image. The goal is to exponentially increase the number of horizontal and vertical pixels available in SD, as well as changing the aspect ratio to 16×9 from 4×3 thus making the image more movie-like. The following chart shows how pixel rates have changed relative to SD.

Obviously the push for HD goes beyond television. Today there is demand for HD in streaming media, DVDs, PVRs, security surveillance, digital still cameras, digital camcorders, cell phones and even videophones. As a result, market analysts are predicting explosive growth. For HDTV alone, we are expecting to see nearly 120 million units shipped by 2008.

So the demand is there – though Gene might argue that the technology is driving the demand without a corresponding need for such a good picture (read his anecdote about sound quality influencing video perception). Regardless, we need to discuss what this means to you as a system designer. Hopefully we can get a good discussion going about, not only the opportunities, but also the tough choices that have to be made. I have my own ideas which I look forward to sharing – but I don’t have all the answers. Agree or disagree, I’d like to hear from you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 6th, 2006 at 2:24 pm and is filed under TI Video360 Blog, 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.