About five years ago I bought a Compaq Presario laptop PC. It cost the best part of £800 and at the time seemed a bargain. By today’s standards it’s a lumbering slab of redundant junk. Even after adding another 128Mb of RAM (useful, speed-inducing memory), it’s still glacially slow. It weighs enough to cause light bruising if I do winch it on to my lap and runs Windows ‘98 as its operating system, which Microsoft no longer supports. It has no DVD drive or wireless capability and, thanks to the additional memory, battery life is now about 20 minutes. Factoring in the time it takes to wheeze into action, that gives me about 15 seconds of cable-free work time.
Belated research confirms that my thoroughbred workhorse was, and always had been, a donkey. A similar lack of techno-foresight also caused me to be an early adopter of a 42-inch plasma display that I now wish I’d left at the orphanage because it’s not “HD Ready” (HD meaning High Definition) and is no better than the hulking cathode ray tube it replaced. It cost nearly £2,000. Today that would buy me a wafer-thin, top-of-the-range Sony Bravia roughly the size of my front door and still leave change for a quality DVD player. With hindsight, it was madness but, for a while, I was satisfied. And at least I’d bought something, rather than being afflicted by “gizmo inertia”, a condition induced by the suspicion that something better and cheaper is just around the corner.
Doing nothing is always the easier option. I once had a Sony PlayStation but gave it away; I’ve never owned anything made by Nintendo; I do not possess a personal digital assistant (PDA); I still play my vinyl LPs and I’d quite like a mobile phone purely for telephony, but that is just my little fantasy. But I’ve sat on the fence for so long bits of me are going numb. Time to clamber down and, as the phrase has it, get with the programme.
According to a “technology census” of 10,000 consumers commissioned by electronics retailer Currys, Britons spend £22bn a year upgrading their gadgets. More than half buy something new or improved every year and the average tech-spend is £520 per person per year. There are now 100m televisions in UK homes and year-on-year sales of large flat-panel TVs are up 200 per cent. The principal reason for this boom is HD, which is a little bizarre given that broadcast HD is only available via satellite (Sky), cable (Virgin Media) or some committed electronic DIY. Freeview HD in the UK could only happen after the analogue switch-off in 2012 and there will be stiff competition from phone companies for such newly available bandwidth.
If you’ve not yet seen high-definition television, you really should. Even for dyed-in-the-wool cynics it’s a revelation; like having a layer of Vaseline wiped from your eyeballs. Colours are more vivid, the clarity of image is disturbingly sharp and your favourite TV icons suddenly look saggy, wrinkled and blotchy – like the rest of us. In the new HD universe no one will ever be ready for their close-up.
In Europe a standard cathode ray tube (CRT) television has 570 visible horizontal lines. To qualify for the “HD Ready” logo a set must have at least 720p horizontal lines. A CRT TV cannot achieve this – only a liquid crystal display (LCD), plasma or rear projection TV can. However, a new generation of “Full HD” plasma and LCD TVs, which can display 1080p horizontal lines, is now on the market.
“Most improvements are in the set rather than the hardware that transmits the image or the disc from which that image is extracted,” says Johan van de Ven, chief technology officer and senior vice-president of Philips Consumer Electronics. “We still work with a limited colour triangle in the digital industry. There is a lot of space for improvement in terms of the sharpness of the image, motion artefacts, colour saturation.”
“Two years ago only about 4 per cent of TVs sold were HD Ready but by the end of December 2006, 88 per cent of TVs sold over 26 inches were HD Ready and one in 10 UK homes now has an HD Ready TV,” says Hilary Perchard, head of product marketing for Sky HD. “It’s about consumers being ready, us being ready and about content availability; there has to be content for people to watch.”
High definition is a relative term. Take a picture designed for transmission on a teensy TV screen and blow it up to cinema-screen proportions and you’ll be looking at a blanket of fuzz. Movies, though, are another matter. “Any major Hollywood movie that’s shot on 35mm film can be transferred over to HD,” says Perchard. “As HD has taken off in the US the TV studios are making more of their content in HD because they know if viewers have a choice between a series in standard definition and one in HD, they’ll generally go for the HD.”
This may be true, but so is the fact that tripe is still a cow’s stomach no matter how you garnish it. The advent of HD home cinema projectors and increasingly monstrous HD TVs combined with some nifty file-compression technology means it is now possible to squeeze a Hollywood movie on to a disc the same size as a standard DVD and then decompress it so thoroughly that what you see on your HD TV is far superior to the picture you’d get from a DVD designed to be shown only on a CRT TV.
The participants might not describe it as such but a “format war” is currently being waged between legions of geeks fighting the high-definition corners of Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Both are new formats for pre-recorded HD content; mainly movies but also such TV series as Planet Earth, Bleak House, Rome, Nip/Tuck and 24, which have been shot in HD.
Blu-ray’s principal advocate is Sony, allied to the various might of Apple, Hewlett-Packard, LG, Panasonic, Dolby, Philips, Pioneer, Samsung, 20th Century Fox and others. HD-DVD has been developed by Toshiba, which counts Microsoft, Hitachi, Sanyo, Universal Studios and NEC among its affiliates. Several movie studios, including Disney, Warner Bros and Paramount are hedging their bets and supplying movie content to both, a far cry from the mid-1990s when DVD might have been smothered at birth had Warner Bros’ head of home entertainment, Warren Lieberfarb, not stamped his foot and persuaded his counterparts at other studios that DVD would prevail and if they didn’t embrace it, it would be the movie business, not DVD, that would expire.
Sony lost Format War I when VHS prevailed over their Betamax. They’re better equipped for FW II because, through Sony Pictures (which also owns the MGM and United Artists back catalogues), they now control a huge tranche of content. The first HD-DVD and Blu-ray players were available in the US from mid-2006. Neither is cheap: Toshiba’s HD XA1 and HD A1 were selling for $799 and $499 respectively and the cheapest Blu-ray player was $1,000.
If you want either format in the UK and Europe your only options are the Xbox 360 (for which an add-on HD DVD drive is available – if you can find one and have cash to burn) or a Toshiba Qosmio laptop, and the Sony PlayStation 3 or one of Sony’s fancy Vaio laptops. Sony Blu-ray players are scheduled for launch in March. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are both “backwards compatible”, meaning they will play your music CDs and standard DVDs, the latter of which will be “upscaled” to near-HD quality. At the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas in January, LG launched a dual-drive machine that plays both Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs.
“I do believe that in the next year Blu-ray will be about enthusiasts and early adopters. It won’t be a mass market product,” says Sony’s group product manager Darren Ambridge. “History has proved that early adopters are prepared; they want the latest gadgets and they’re prepared to pay for them. Personally I think it will take around 18 months for one format to emerge as the clear consumer choice.”
For those of us who aren’t such early adopters or don’t have such deep pockets, the best option might be to buy an HD Ready TV and a good- quality upscaling DVD player, such as a Denon DVD-1930 or Arcam DV137, and enjoy a better quality experience from the DVDs we already own. There have been mixed reactions in the media to the quality, reliability and functionality of early HD-DVD and Blu-ray players. Although the pictures from both can be stunning, the arguments used to justify the price of such improvements are not dissimilar to those used to persuade wine buyers that the sensory experience to be gained from a bottle of Château Latour makes it worth the premium over a bottle of supermarket wine. As in so many cases, the law of diminishing returns applies.
What is clear is that in the coming years our televisual experience will be bigger, better, more involving. We will embrace HD and 5:1 – or even 7:1 – digital surround sound. We will pop our own corn and pour our own drinks instead of overpaying at the cinema. We will snuggle into our sofas in silent reverie, released from the babbling commentary of restless spotty teens. We will shut the door, draw the curtains and commune with ourselves and the flickering fantasy on the wall. Our virtual reality will be so real and yet so safe. A sanitised world of wonders.
