Warning on HDTV quality

There’s an interesting report that warns on the varying quality of HDTV between manufacturers, with a clear warnign to consumers to take great care in choosing your set - or else you can end up with a substandard product:

In the December issue of The Perfect Vision magazine, senior editor Gary Merson tested 53 HDTV sets and discovered that more than half used only half of the 1,080 lines that most broadcasters transmit in their high-definition signals.

Merson’s findings have set off a storm of controversy among manufacturers whose sets failed his test.

But in truth, the sets that failed did so because some manufacturers opted to display the 540-line half-resolution fields sequentially and individually rather than spend more money on new chips that weave the broadcast’s two 540-line fields into a single full-resolution, 1,080-line frame for processing.

As Merson reported, “. . . processing the two 540-line high-resolution images individually yields a picture that is sharper than standard analog television, but not as sharp as it could be.”