The PC in HD @ [H] Consumer

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Jason_Wall

[H] Consumer Managing Editor
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Jul 22, 2005
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"HD" is a term thrown around with great regularity - sometimes, if not often, by those who have no idea what it means. Given, it's a complicated technology with lots of ins and outs, but in this article we try to break it down so that you can participate a bit more in those water cooler discussions. We also give a look ahead to what's coming up.

Almost everyone has heard the term “HD” these days, even if they don’t know exactly what it means. The marketing definition is “better looking TV,” and while that’s good enough for most people, actually getting that “better looking TV” can be difficult and quite expensive. Every related product has taken advantage of those two letters. Advertisers have even used it to refer to mundane products such as window cleaners (“for a high definition shine!”). It can be a confusing technology for those just looking to purchase their first HDTV unit, but for those looking to enter the world of High Definition through their PCs, it can be even more complicated.
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Thanks for reading!
 
Decent writeup for HD newbs. Though I'd recommend buying an HD disk player when they're 50 bux at WalMart. Not now. I have $20K in home theater equipment and refuse to buy an HD player until they come down in price.
 
Great article, except for this very misleading tidbit:

If any one of these components is not, the image will be shown at a lower resolution (through an ICT flag), an error message may be displayed, or you may just get a blank screen.
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Which, I am sorry to say, is flat-out wrong. The downgrading or disabling you mentioned will only happen if your devices don't support HDCP, and if/B] the ICT is set to "downgrade" or "disallow." Per my link, Hollywood has agreed to leave ICTs at "do nothing" until at least the year 2010, when HDCP-compliant displays will most certainly be more prominent.

I'm not one to complain about [H] articles, but this is a glaringly misleading statement that I really think needs to be corrected.
 
InorganicMatter said:
Great article, except for this very misleading tidbit:


Which, I am sorry to say, is flat-out wrong. The downgrading or disabling you mentioned will only happen if your devices don't support HDCP, and if/B] the ICT is set to "downgrade" or "disallow." Per my link, Hollywood has agreed to leave ICTs at "do nothing" until at least the year 2010, when HDCP-compliant displays will most certainly be more prominent.

I'm not one to complain about [H] articles, but this is a glaringly misleading statement that I really think needs to be corrected.
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Thanks for your thoughts.

I wouldn't call our comment misleading, as we listed downgrading the signal as a possible scenario, but all the same, I corrected the article for clarity.
 
I enjoy my DVDs as is. I will refuse to buy any HD disc player until one format in settled on. I'm tired of the arrogance of the old Sony vs Matsushita war. I was a Betamax early adopter (circa 1979). Then it was SACD vs. DVD Audio. Now it's HD's turn. Screw both of them.
 
By far, the most successful digital format for movies is the Digital Video Disc or DVD.
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dvd stands for digital versatile disc, not digital video disc.
 
Thanks for a great article yet again. At my job I have a co worker who always brags about HD and how he like gaming on his tv @ 720 because it's "HD". I guess ignorance truly is bliss.
 
[H] Enthusiast did an article and an interview covering some of the specifics about how all of this is handled on the PC back in September. Very much worth a read when it comes to what a PC user should expect in terms of HD and BluRay.

Looking for HD on your PC or HTPC? What video cards, displays, hardware, software? We ask some pointed questions of NVIDIA about making this happen and then tell you about our experiences with HD-DVD and NVIDIA's PureVideHD technology.
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I like the editorial format, but with a title like "HD on the PC" I was expecting a much more thorough article that explored HDTV as well as HD discs. I would suggest a more appropriate title for this article would be "HD-DVD and Bluray on the PC".
 
At my job I have a co worker who always brags about HD and how he like gaming on his tv @ 720 because it's "HD". I guess ignorance truly is bliss.
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I have a 100" screen at my house running off a 720P Projector and everyone who see it for the first time drops their jaw. If 720P looks that good at 100" I am sure it looks fine at 50 or below like what most people are buying today. I find that the video source is very important. WHen watching the two playoff games a few weeks ago the first one on Fox di not look nearly as good as the one on CBS.. The picture was stunning on the second game.
 
jpcahn said:
I have a 100" screen at my house running off a 720P Projector and everyone who see it for the first time drops their jaw. If 720P looks that good at 100" I am sure it looks fine at 50 or below like what most people are buying today. I find that the video source is very important. WHen watching the two playoff games a few weeks ago the first one on Fox di not look nearly as good as the one on CBS.. The picture was stunning on the second game.
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You are absolutely correct. However, a lot of people also seem to forget that brightness and contrast ratio are just as, if not more, important than resolution. A good DLP or projector at 720p will look better than an LCD at 1080p, becuase of the highly superior brightness and contrast provided by a light-based imaging system. My 42" DLP is 720p, and watching upconverted movies on my HTPC, you'd never be able to tell it wasn't 1080p on a blind test.
 
there is an informal comparison article/forum post somewhere online. i think avs or one of those av enthusiast forums brought a whole bundh of HT enthusiasts together and projected both 720p and 1080p from BluRay and HD DVD and Cable HD content on somn gigantic like 200-300" diagonal or somn. less than 1% of the 20 or so self proclaimed "enthusiasts" couldn't tell the diff. between 720p/1080p. the projector itself was covered so no one knew which FP it was coming out of it. no one could guess it correctly. :D. 1080p is just one of those bragging rights...
 
To make a long story short PC gamers have been playing in "HD" ever since quake2 1995 (ish) and now consoles can finally enjoy this too to some degree depending on the game or exactly when it was released. So this means it has taken 12 friggen years for the console to catch up in resolution, if that is you have a few grand for a HD TV....

Nice....

Am I the only one that thinks this is a joke really?
 
maleficarus said:
To make a long story short PC gamers have been playing in "HD" ever since quake2 1995 (ish) and now consoles can finally enjoy this too to some degree depending on the game or exactly when it was released. So this means it has taken 12 friggen years for the console to catch up in resolution, if that is you have a few grand for a HD TV....

Nice....

Am I the only one that thinks this is a joke really?
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no!
 
For front projectors, optics are more important than the resolution. In a blind test of identical source material fed through both a Marantz 720p and a Marantz 1080p projector, more people said that the 720p image looked "better". I can say with certaintly, however, that HD DVD does make a difference over standard DVDs on my setup, but most of the newer DVDs upconverted are looking shockingly close to some lesser HD broadcasts I've seen through Time Warner Cable.
 
jebo_4jc said:
I like the editorial format, but with a title like "HD on the PC" I was expecting a much more thorough article that explored HDTV as well as HD discs. I would suggest a more appropriate title for this article would be "HD-DVD and Bluray on the PC".
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To me it seemed more of a general how-to than an editorial. I see an editorial as a kind of state of affairs on a subject with the editors thoughts on the subject.

But I didn't realize that broadcast and QAM HD wasn't mentioned either.
 
Some of this may be irrelevant because HDCP is activated by a flag present on the movie discs themselves. Currently, no currently released titles utilize HDCP protection, and rumors abound that it could be 2010 before movies with HDCP are released.
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AFAIK, this is wrong. Any PC that is using DVI or HDMI will not be able to play a full-res HD-DVD or Blueray disc without HDCP. This is right now.

What's not active at the moment is the Image Constraint Token (ICT). When the ICT is active, a downgraded image (960x540) is ouput via the analog component outputs instead of the full resotion picture.

With or without ICT, you need HDCP on a digital connection.
 
Perfect timing, I needed this article bad as I just built a brand new HD setup
and I'm still trying to figure out what im going to do with it.
 
lol.. man. I don't know what some of these people are smoking. I have all sorts of sources to compare against, and I can MOST DEFINETLY tell the difference between SD, 720p, and 1080 content. I have the 360 HDDVD drive to view 1080p VC-1 content on, Blu-ray content to compare to HDDVD content, x264 and mpeg2 1080p content, x264 and mpeg2 720p content, and I have my whole collection of DVD's with the same movie titles as a couple of my HDDVD's.

If you don't have good sources or encodes, of course you won't be able to tell the difference between any of them. I've seen 1080p encodes that look worse than a good 720p encode. Once you've seen a 1080p HDDVD or Bluray movie a full digitally connected monitor, there really is no turning back to lower res content from how I see it with my eyes. The small details are really what shines with 1080p content. The bitrate is also so high up there that there's almost no loss in quality you can see with the naked eye as far as image quality goes compared to any other source besides IMAX.

Watching 1080i content broadcast over my HD cable TV and OTA, I can tell the difference between it like night and day, especially in the darks/shadows on the screen. Also most of the time the 1080i content where small text is being focused on by the camera appears a little more fuzzy than 1080p. Its little things like that I notice. I have a HD upconversion DVD player as well, and that is just a joke and a real dead giveaway. If you had projectors lined up with all the different formats of upconversion, 720p, and 1080p, I could pick them out of a lineup just by looking at them in under a minute.
 
maleficarus said:
To make a long story short PC gamers have been playing in "HD" ever since quake2 1995 (ish) and now consoles can finally enjoy this too to some degree depending on the game or exactly when it was released. So this means it has taken 12 friggen years for the console to catch up in resolution, if that is you have a few grand for a HD TV....

Nice....

Am I the only one that thinks this is a joke really?
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GLQuake actually (Quake 1) using two Monster 2s and SLI. Along with Tomb Raider and Mechwarrior. Was the shizzle of the day playing Team Fortress on Quakeworld.
 
I was dissapointed with the article.

There should of been screenshots of BR vs HDDVD using what ever software disk player combined with PureVideo and Avivo and what would happen when viewed with hdcp/non-hdcp compliant software/hardware at different resolutions if possible. The pc gaming aspect should also of shown screenshots of different resolutions even if difference between them would of been moot (save for games that have development teams thinking clearly and support widescreen resolutions). There should of been coverage of video cards to capture/view hd content on the pc either OTA or Qam, on top of your info on just movies.

It didn't feel as thorough as I'm accustomed to from you guys.
 
kuyaglen said:
I was dissapointed with the article.

There should of been screenshots of BR vs HDDVD using what ever software disk player combined with PureVideo and Avivo and what would happen when viewed with hdcp/non-hdcp compliant software/hardware at different resolutions if possible. The pc gaming aspect should also of shown screenshots of different resolutions even if difference between them would of been moot (save for games that have development teams thinking clearly and support widescreen resolutions). There should of been coverage of video cards to capture/view hd content on the pc either OTA or Qam, on top of your info on just movies.

It didn't feel as thorough as I'm accustomed to from you guys.
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That wasn't the purpose of this particular article, but one like what you mentioned is in the works.
 
Jason_Wall said:
That wasn't the purpose of this particular article, but one like what you mentioned is in the works.
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Whew...

Then I would suggest noting this article as sort of a primer or "1st in a series of..." type because I took the line, "We look at the highs and the lows of HD on the PC and what the future might hold." as a bit more than what was detailed. A final statement about continuing the subject would of been helpfull.
 
I think anyone with or considering buying a large screen TV knows this stuff already, or if they dont better read up on it. The guy at BestBuy or Circuit City sure wont even know this much.(reference to article)

Any computer buff knows that what we can generate on the monitor is already HD or better.

This was a good starter for somebody who is out of the loop on HD.:D
 
kuyaglen said:
Whew...

Then I would suggest noting this article as sort of a primer or "1st in a series of..." type because I took the line, "We look at the highs and the lows of HD on the PC and what the future might hold." as a bit more than what was detailed. A final statement about continuing the subject would of been helpfull.
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completely agree (as my post above indicates)
 
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