New Technology TV

There have been several recent developments that could influence how soon high definition television will catch on in the mainstream television viewing public. Perhaps the most notable new development is that large screen high definition television sets are approaching the one thousand dollar mark. Recently retailer Circuit City has decided to sell the Polaroid PLA-4248 for $1,399 which translates into $1,299 after a one hundred dollar rebate. The forty two inch Plasma TV comes with a HDMI port even though it has a high definition tuner built in. It can receive high definition television signals from cable, satellite, and over the air. While many consumers are waiting for prices to drop below one thousand dollars, a thirteen hundred dollar forty two inch High Definition Television set is definitely a step in the right direction.

Anyone who has ever watched a rerun of a mainstream movie with a rating higher than "G" on network television has probably noticed that some scenes or even individual shots have been left out. This is especially obvious if they've seen the movie before either in a theater or on an unedited video tape or DVD At the very least the language has been changed. Often this creates a sense of something not being quite right while watching it.

Back in 1968, pop icon Andy Warhol said that "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." While this may be an exaggeration of what democracy would mandate for the lives of everyday people, it was also a statement about what communications technology could do for people all over the world. When the statement was first made, telecommunications technology was primitive. Most TV sets still had vacuum tubes instead of transistors and computers took up entire rooms and had input/output devices that utilized punch cards. Not only was telecommunication technology more primitive in terms of data processing, but it was also more limited in terms of volume. Even in the largest cities, there were only a hand full of television stations, only broadcasting over the air. Communications satellites had only recently ceased to be a dream of Arthur C. Clarke, and satellite Television was like something out of The Jetsons.

While most surveys conclude that American's are not interested in watching video on their computers, and computer manufacturers have failed in past attempts to merge computer and television technologies, other survey results give them reason to keep trying.

HP has recently announced a new lineup of products available for the coming holiday season that combine High Definition television technology with computers. HP is offering a notebook computer capable of displaying High Definition content on a separate High Definition display. There's also a new desk top model that has an HD-DVD player, a Digital Video Recorder, and a TV tuner all built in. This desk top model also features Intel Viiv technology which allows it to display computer graphics and television alike on a television display. HP is also introducing an external HD-DVD ROM Drive which can be used to watch High Definition movies on a wide screen notebook computer. There's also the new HP Media Vault which allows multiple computers and television screens to access digital content across a home network. To round things out HP is also introducing a 2.5 inch USB hard drive in eighty and one hundred twenty gigabyte versions which can be used to transport a variety of media, including movies and television shows back and forth between computers.

There are some new developments in the war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray HDTV DVD formats. Actually it seems like every time you turn around there is a new development in this battle. It really all started with the realization that since standard DVD's can't hold enough data to support the wider screen and higher resolution that are part of the High Definition television format, the electronics industry had to come up with a new video disc format that could. The answer was to use blue violet lasers to encode the data onto the discs and read it back off of the discs. Since blue violet lasers have shorter wavelengths than the red lasers that are used on standard DVD's they can pack data onto a disk more densely. The problem with this came about when Sony introduced the Blu-ray format and Toshiba introduced the HD-DVD format. Although both discs use blue violet lasers there are a number of more subtle differences between the two that make them incompatible. Further complicating the issue, a variety of big names in the electronics industry, the movie industry, and the software industry have thrown their support behind one or the other of the formats. It's generally agreed that only one format will survive, but too many powerful companies have too much invested in one format or another to back down.

New innovations can appear extremely quickly in the realm of consumer electronics. Sometimes it seems like new technologies are developed, refined, and marketed all in the blink of an eye. The consumer side of things, on the other hand, can be a little more sluggish. High prices, confusion over what it is that the product is or does, lack of marketing, and numerous other perturbations in the marketplace can cause great technology to sit on shelves while consumers walk past. Such has been the case definition High Definition Television.

High Definition Television is all the rage these days. Prices on High Definition TV sets are dropping and will soon fall below the price where many analysts believe that consumers will begin buying them up in droves. High Definition programming is also more widely available and aired on more channels than ever before. There are also more supporting technologies like HD Digital Video Recorders and next generation DVD's capable of storing High Definition video content.

There's been a lot of activity lately among computer manufacturers and software companies who are trying to tap into the similarities between computers and televisions. Most of the time computer manufacturers have been trying to develop computers that people will plug their TV's into. This could have a number of advantages like being able to watch video downloaded from the Internet on the living room television. It could also let people surf the web and get normal work done using a larger screen and from the comfort of their own couches.

One company that's been a big name in video games for years is Nintendo. In many ways Nintendo revived interest in video game systems that can be hooked up to televisions (as opposed to video games played on home computers). It put out a number of good systems in the late eighties and throughout the nineties.

An offshoot of television technology that's been available for a while but hasn't really caught on is audio only television. Television without a picture may seem like an oxymoron, but special radios that play just the sound from over the air television channels have been around for decades. (Actually I have no idea if they're still around, but I remember seeing them decades ago.) While having access to the audio from a television show provides some semblance of actually watching it, in general it doesn't do justice to the whole experience and for that reason it tends to frustrate people. Even television news broadcasts are somehow emptier when all you can hear is the audio.

One thing that many people use their televisions for that goes largely unnoticed in the greater scheme of things is video gaming. There are actually a variety of gaming platforms on the market that are designed to take full advantage of state of the art television technology like High Definition Television. The video game platform that's dominated the market all the way back to 1994 is Sony's PlayStation. With over thirteen thousand individual PlayStation video game titles available world wide, this platform easily backs up that domination.