Are you ready for the next generation of home entertainment? If you're the type who must own every single techno-gadget on the market, then the answer to this question should be an automatic yes.
HDTVs rely on digital broadcasts to produce the picture that appears on the television screen. Digital broadcasts encode television signals as a series of ones and zeros.
"It digitizes an image much like a digital camera does," Electrical Engineering Prof. Yibin Zheng said.
This comes as a major improvement over traditional analog broadcasting, which relies on variations in the physical characteristics of the signal to convey video information.
As more broadcasting companies digitize their signals, viewers no longer will need to worry about fuzzy channels - unlike analog broadcasts, digital broadcasts don't degrade as they travel long distances.
But digital television's strongest selling point is its image quality - when you watch HDTV, you feel as if you're looking at a giant computer screen.
The new television sets are clearer than their homely predecessors because HDTV uses a higher screen resolution.
All television screens are composed of tiny cells called pixels. HDTVs produce sharper images because they have many more pixels than standard televisions.
Normal U.S. television sets display only 480 horizontal lines of pixels, while HDTVs can display up to twice that many.
HDTVs also flicker less because each pixel is refreshed 60 times per second instead of the standard 30.
Digital broadcasting does more than just produce a sharper image, however - it also allows broadcasters to stuff more sound information into the signal, potentially beaming movie theatre-quality sound into homes everywhere.
An even more far-reaching use of HDTV is the marriage of television to the Internet. Several hybrid products such as WebTV already are available, but enjoy limited fanfare.
It appears technology geeks must wait a little longer for the day when digital media becomes a single interface. Eventually, however, "we will have a common standard and all devices will talk to each other through digital standards," Zheng said.
Even though HDTVs already have been commercially available for three years, consumers have been slow to snatch up the new technology.
That's because broadcasting networks have been sluggish in going digital, and HDTV prices remain out of reach for the average consumer - the high-tech televisions sell from $1,000 to 10 times that much.
Right now "people are better off with a converter box," which transforms digital signals into analog format, Zheng said.
The $300 box allows consumers to view digital broadcasts without buying a new television. This might be the best solution until more networks go digital.
If the Federal Communications Commission gets its way, all television stations will broadcast digital signals by 2006. Until then, however, consumers are faced with limited availability of digitally televised programs.
Consumers also must deal with the compatibility of HDTV with other media technologies. For example, the superior image quality of DVD movies actually falls short of HDTV imaging capabilities, since DVD players act like converter boxes and send an analog signal to the television, Zheng said.
Hopefully such issues will be resolved as digital media becomes standardized. So unless you don't mind limited channel selection, poor compatibility and a high sticker price, you're probably better off saving your cash for a rainy day.
"If I had nothing else to use my money for, I would buy an HDTV," Zheng said.
- Compiled by Sam Bresnahan
(Submit health and science questions to cavdaily@cavalierdaily.com)
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