Home Theater View

Try It and You Won't Go Back. (Or will you?)

Jeremy Toeman over at LiveDigitally talks about the "living room effect" that can convince even the most hardened skeptic to make the move to HDTV.

I'm a big proponent of experiencing products in order to understand their impact, but there are certain things that even a demo can't cure. I find this uniquely interesting on a personal level because the "living room effect" hasn't proven to be true here, at casa HomeTheaterView. I've had a 53" LCOS HDTV for 2+ years, but reception is over the air (when we get it - it can be flaky), and our ReplayTV is hooked up to the analog cable feed. I refuse to watch SDTV when HDTV is available for the reasons Jeremy cites, but my wife is equally adamant that she will not watch content live with commercials. HDTV encompasses more than one improvement to TV watching -- dramatically higher resolution, digital surround sound, and a widescreen aspect ratio. But my wife prizes one feature above that, her time, and would prefer to watch fuzzy contents and save 18 minutes an hour rather than bask in the glory that is HD.

My wife may be somewhat unique, but there are plenty of TV-loving consumers who have priorities that preclude HDTV at this time. HDTV up front costs are high; HDTV has come way down in price, but sets are still fairly expensive. Ongoing costs of HDTV can be considerably higher than analog, depending on the technology used to recieve the signal. Cable HDTV requires upgrading to a digital package and renting a set top box; some cable and satellite providers charge separately for HDTV channels. And a lot of content - the vast majority of cable channels - is unavailable in HD, so if that's what you watch, buying an HDTV won't make things better (and in some cases, it'll look worse).

A TiVo series 3 may be in my future. I have asked TiVo for a unit to review here; hopefully one will show up soon, and my wife and I can watch TV together again.

-avi

Is Going Luddite the Answer?

Back in January, 2005, I posted a column asking if the speed of new technology was outstripping consumers' abilities to absorb its implications. Thanks to the magic of Google, that old column is now getting new comments, one of which spurred me to revisit the issue.

The complaints are numerous: nothing works with anything else, it all gets outdated too quickly, and retail salespeople don't understand what they're selling, so there's no place to turn for advice. This reader's solution? Withdraw from technology altogether.

The question of when to buy/when to wait is a common one; nobody wants to buy a product that is immediately obsolete. David Pogue's readers (see the first 20 comments or so) advise finding the right device, and just being happy with it. Aside from being preachy, this presumes that consumers already know exactly what their needs are. It also ignores the fact that computing and consumer electronics tend to plateau - when new devices will just have minor feature updates - but also make major shifts from time to time. If you buy just before a dramatically new device comes out, buyer's remorse is completely understandable. Ergo, the fear of buyer's remorse is completely understandable. Generally speaking, everything gets cheaper the longer you wait, but pricing trends are not always constant, either. Knowing when it makes sense to invest in an expensive TV/cameraphone/PC/etc. could genuinely require an understanding of the market, the technology landscape, channel constraints (the world's greatest cameraphone still needs to go through 3 - 6 months of testing at a carrier before it sees the light of day in this country), and product launch cycles.

You could get some of this information by reading engadget every day, putting together charts of upcoming products, reading reviews... and driving yourself insane. (Actually, some people do this as a hobby/addiction, and for some lucky/insane people, it's part of the job). But there is no way a typical hourly retail employee can be expected to track and master this much information. (Even if you run into a peculiar breed of retail employee called The Geek Enthusiast, invariably he - it's always a "he" - has trouble matching the right gadget/technology to your specific needs. And he'll soon be off to a career in product management anyway, so the next time you return he'll be gone.)

In other industries - construction, healthcare, real estate - we hire professionals to overcome design and choice complexity. Of course, experts demand payment for their expertise, and the dollar amounts and margins on most consumer electronics simply do not lend themselves to a workable business model. I cannot imagine a sustainable business where consumers pay $250 in consulting fees to help them choose a $250 device. Aggregated opinions on the web (such as Amazon.com reviews) are a big help, but are not personalized, cannot ensure everything works well together, can't help you learn how to use your new technology, and there's a lot of chaff to sort through to get to the wheat.

Where the total dollar amounts are higher, a professional services model can work. The custom home theater installation market is probably the only consumer electronics area where many of these issues are addressed - for a price. But the majority of consumers buy by brand name (Bose, Apple, Kodak, and Sony all benefit from long brand associations), buy based on simplicity rather than an extended understanding of potential uses (Apple's iPod fits this category nicely), or hold off buying altogether until a category leader has been established (TiVo, iPod).

But going full-on Luddite is not necessarily practical - or even desirable - for most people. For example, in my day job I focus on mobile devices. The data on mobile phones is clear: the things are way too hard to use. The data is also clear: many people consider their cell phones indispensable. One survey declared them the winner of the technology people most love to hate. So people sort of make their peace with technology and use it for a limited set of functions that they can mentally wrap their heads around. They don't know how to silence the phone, so it rings when it shouldn't. They don't know how to lock/unlock the phone (because no manufacturer will install a simple lock/unlock switch as found on every iPod) so it calls their mother by itself. But they won't leave the house without it.

Similarly, consumers may not have a complete grasp of HDTV and even less understanding of whether to choose plasma, LCD, DLP, an LCOS variant, or wait for laser or SED, but at some point, it's football season...

-avi

CEDIA Highlights, Part II

In last month's CEDIA Highlights post, I noted two projectors that broke through the clutter (and there was a lot of clutter: my in box has dozens and dozens of press releases). There was a third announcement that caught my eye, and, surprisingly, it, too, was projector-related.

THX is now certifying home projectors.

On the surface, this does not seem surprising - THX certifies just about everything. In fact, don't they already have a certification program for displays? It certainly seems like they did. (Actually, they did - but only as part of their commercial theater certification program.) THX is starting out with ludicrously expensive Runco models, but the program should trickle down to more affordable home projectors, rear projection televisions, and flat panel displays.

Not everyone loves THX. First of all, it's a licensing program. It costs money to get the logo, but doesn't offer anything concrete in exchange; theoretically, if your product meets all of THX's specifications, you could be THX-certifiable without actually being THX-certified and pass the savings along to your customers. A bigger issue is that THX's specifications are based on a specific philosophy. On the audio side, the philosophy includes notions of how a speaker should be constructed (small satellites, big subwoofers, and a specific crossover type and crossover frequency), how soundtracks mixed for commercial theaters should be adapted for the home environment, and how rear speakers should be integrated into a system. Reasonable people at, say, a speaker manufacturer, could disagree on an aspect of the technical approach that THX certification demands, but because the THX logo is respected in the market, they may lose business by building things their way instead of THX's methodology.

THX Certified Display testing includes the following:

• Front of Screen (FOS) Testing
  • Luminance
  • Contrast
  • Color Gamut
  • Gamma
  • Uniformity
  • Max Resolution
• Video Signal Processing Testing
  • Scaling
  • Deinterlacing
  • Motion/Video Conversion

I am 100% confident that there will be controversy over THX's video specifications. I couldn't tell you what specifically will cause hand wringing - or whether it will be a specification of omission: THX's video certification program was been rightly villified several years back for certifying terrible letterbox transfers; the specs simply didn't go far enough in that case.

Still, I believe that, on balance, THX is an incredibly positive force for home theater audio and video reproduction. If you assemble a THX-approved system, even from different vendors, you know that the individual products will perform to a certain set of specifications, and that they were designed to complement each other. I also appreciate the notion of a certification program in the first place. Sure, Vendor X has a good reputation, and Vendor Y has a powerful brand. But THX drives the entire industry, for better or worse, towards a unified A/V philosophy. Aside from buying every component in your system from a single brand -- as if that were even possible (outside of Sony and Samsung) -- THX assures a level of uniformity of purpose and performance in home theater products. I like that.

-avi