Brian's Brain

Within my March, 2006 cover story on blue laser optical storage formats, I devoted some of the 'A Disturbance In The Force' section to explaining why, unless you've got an extremely large display and/or sit extremely close to it (a viewing environment even further modulated by such factors as ambient lighting, along with display illumination and color settings), the incremental resolution improvement of either Blu-ray or HD DVD will be imperceptible to your eyes and brain. One of the online addendums to that article provided further information on this issue, courtesy of presentation materials delivered by Pixelworks at the 2005 SID ADEAC show.

Courtesy of Engadget HD, you've now got a one-stop chart that overlays common video formats (480p, 720p, 1080i/p, and 1440p) on a matrix with viewing distance along the vertical axis and diagonal screen size along the horizontal axis. With it, you can also see the flipside of the 'is Blu-ray or HD DVD increased resolution perceptible' coin. Specifically look at the ~100 inch diagonal screen size displays that have been showcased at CES the past two years, correlated against the 720p and 1080i/p resolutions supported in high-def sources such as ATSC, Blu-ray and HD DVD. Unless you sit very far away from such a massive display, the individual source material scan lines will be clearly discernable (which is not a good thing). Two years ahead of when ATSC will come to the forefront by virtue of the proposed NTSC shutoff date, is ATSC already obsolete? Or, alternatively, does this data suggest that 100+ inch screens won't be anything more than a niche product, at least for a while (regardless of the Jetsons' predictions of wall-size displays)? Just how big, and how deep, are most living rooms, even in the U.S. but especially outside it?

Nikhil Balram, a name recognizeable to some of you from my past writeups, began his career at Faroudja and, after several video processing twists and turns (including a brief detour as Vice President of Marketing at SONICBlue, developer of the ReplayTV), is now at Marvell. As part of our enjoyable breakfast meeting at CES, we spent some time brainstorming 'what's next' for displays, video sources, and the video processors that'll glue them together. High frame rate displays were one likely candidate we came up with, to eliminate the imperfect current frame rate gap between 24 fps film material and 30 Hz screens (which today is bridged by clumsy transformations such as telecine). 72 Hz and 120 Hz are both candidates; the latter is somewhat more challenging and, therefore, expensive to develop but is an even multiple of both 24 fps film and 30 fps video material. This two-part Gizmodo writeup provides additional information on the theory behind 72 and 120 Hz sets, as well as some implementation examples from the recent CES.

I'll close with a few video-related chuckles. This tutorial harnesses both Oompa-Loompas and pipe weed-smoking Hobbits to explain (or not) the respective strengths and shortcomings of 720p and 1080i source material. I take no responsibility if you're more confused after reading the cartoon-enhanced explanation than you were before you started; at minimum, however, you should be giggling at least a bit. And finally, in the midst of an 'explain your editorial beat' exercise that I tackled over the weekend, I pointed out that as direct-view LCD and plasma displays' screens become cost-effectively ever larger in size, they are (as I predicted back in March of 2005) eroding the market share positions of rear-view projection display techologies like CRT, LCD, LCoS and DLP. Why? This two-photo sequence from Gizmodo makes the answer abundantly clear.

"Well, honey, it seemed like a good idea at the time...."