Re: Chinese choose both VSB and OFDM
- From: Mark Crispin <MRC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 16:49:50 -0700
On Wed, 28 Jun 2006, Joseph Wind wrote:
Which is why the US has far more digital HDTV broadcast today than anyI thought Japan was. They have had HDTV longer than the US. Most of their
other country in the world.
TV shows are in HD or wide-screen format.
Note that I said "digital HDTV".
Japan has excellent *analog* HDTV that is indeed quite widely deployed throughout the country. However, Japanese digital HDTV is still very new and only available in a few cities.
Also note that Japanese is a relatively small (and very densely populated) island chain. Only about 18% of the Japanese landmass is habitable; the rest is sheer mountains/volcanoes.
Nonetheless, it is probably still the case today that Japan has the greatest number of HDTV viewers in the world, although geographically its HDTV coverage has been surpassed by the US.
The US is far ahead of Japan on deployment of digital HDTV, mainly because the US (and everybody else) skipped analog HDTV and went directly to digital for HDTV.
In most US markets, the majority of digital TV stations have at least some HDTV programming. In the Seattle market, only one PBS station (of two), the PAX/i station, two religious stations, and two home shopping stations have no HDTV programming. All the other stations have at least some HDTV: ABC, CBS, FOX, NBS, the other PBS station, UPN, WB, and an independent.
Bob Miller would have you believe that PAX/i, religious, and home shopping broadcasters are leading the way for digital TV and that HDTV will go away. Fortunately, whatever Bob Miller says, the opposite is true.
I don't know if it makes a difference, but Hong Kong uses PAL at 50Hz.
PAL is neither HDTV nor digital. PAL is a competing analog color system to the NTSC system used in the US and Japan. In the bad old days of vacuum tubes, PAL delivered superior color to NTSC; that hasn't been the case since modern PLL tuners became widely deployed in the 1980s.
In fact, PAL today is arguably inferior in its rendition of green due to the phase shift. However most people can't tell the difference between PAL and NTSC given quality equipment and signal on both.
Most PAL countries use a 50Hz 625 line TV system (System B, D, I, L, or K; Hong Kong is System I) whereas all NTSC countries use 60Hz 525 line System M.
The TV system has nothing to do with the color system; in fact, a few countries (e.g., Brazil) use PAL-M which is PAL color on TV System M.
An incredible amount of bickering exists over whether it is better to have the extra 100 scan lines or the faster screen rate that doesn't flicker as badly. Personally, I find the flicker of the 50Hz systems to be a greater irritant than the inferior resolution of 525 lines.
There is a third color system called SECAM. It is used with the 50Hz/625-line TV systems, primarily by France, its current and former colonies, and the former Soviet bloc countries.
The main thing that can be said on SECAM's behalf is that it was invented by the French and thus is not tainted by being invented by the Americans (NTSC) or the [West] Germans (PAL). Some people say that SECAM stands for "Something Essentially Contrary to American Methods", although actually it's a French term that translates as "electronic system with color using memory."
I find SECAM to be inferior to all respects to PAL and NTSC.
-- Mark --
http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
.
- References:
- Chinese choose both VSB and OFDM
- From: Bob Miller
- Re: Chinese choose both VSB and OFDM
- From: Mark Crispin
- Re: Chinese choose both VSB and OFDM
- From: Joseph Wind
- Chinese choose both VSB and OFDM
- Prev by Date: Re: Plasma picture problem
- Next by Date: Re: I want a portable HD tv!!
- Previous by thread: Re: Chinese choose both VSB and OFDM
- Next by thread: Re: Chinese choose both VSB and OFDM
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
