Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

I thought Tommorows World would be vibrant, interesting articles and a downloadable podcast. What a disappoint it is a plain old boring blog! Get a life Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

I'll second that Geoff!

The blog is interesting enough to warrant reading, but the re-emergence of the Tomorrows World brand should have been heralded with something a little more special. Something more along the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ News 'Magazine' section.

The Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ really thinks blogs are the solution to information provision, and that we're all hooked - we really aren't! It was bad enough having the Ashes news in blog format, now we face this dry provision!

Bring back some decent web editors and give us some real content!

1080p Sounds great and will be when all broadcasts and film productions are in 1080p. Until then the vast majority of people in the UK will be viewing TV via freeview or normal Sky/Cable tv. These do not use 1080p,1080i or 720p. They are broadcast in 576i. The 1080p sets have to do a hell of a lot of processing to manipulate the 576i image to fit the which at the moment they do not do to well. The manufactures seem to be bringing these sets out because the media keep banging on about waiting for the 1080p Full HD experience. Yes they look great on a 1080P input, but nowhere near as good on normal TV. Stick with a TV that gives you the best performance for the types of picture you are likley to watch. If you only watch Freeview or DVD stick with a conventional set until ther broadcasts are there for you to worry about.

I bought a Sharp Aquos 52inch LDC 1080p TV 2 weeks ago for only Β£2400! (response time 4ms)

Sharp seems to be on a big push atm to drive the other manufacturers out of business, as the nearest rival TV I found was Sony at Β£5999.99!!!!!!

You can't have done a lot of research if you didn't know that 1080p was in the pipeline. It's been debated for almost as long as HDTV has been existence, and although this essentially means the last year in the UK, behind the times as we are, they've been enjoying it across the Atlantic since 2002.

It's not like it's a problem. No HDTV system is going to not support 720p or 1080i since the vast majority of TVs only support those, and unless you're getting above the 50" mark you're not going to see the benefits of 1080p.

I will read everything what is not signed by Bill Thompson. So go ahead Darren! :)

Whats next? Shall we say the truth about HD-DVD and Blue Ray ? They have same quality and disks capacity difference is not important and not going to be important for few years (enough for next gen storage to appear and replace these). And that makes difference in price (we all know that HD DVD is twice cheaper) to be an absolute rip-off for end-users by a big corporate business.

Shall we? Or main editor will be having a bad time if else?

Maybe it's because news organisations like yourself contiue to get the facts wrong and offer different information to the reader leaving many confused. This article is a prime example, it's under the tomorrows world blog leading people to believe that it might be a useful source of technology information, when in the facts behind the main topic discussing are wrong!

"Many televisions in the last year had a top resolution of 1080i - a slightly less high quality resolution where the lines in the image are shown sequentially instead of all at once in the case of 1080p."

that statement is actually the opposite to the truth. The i stands for interlaced i.e the odd lines are shown on the first frame and the even lines shown on the second the way your vision works tricks your mind into seeing the full picture, it came about to save bandwidth when broadcasting shows. Where as you say the lines are shown sequentially :/. Now the p stands for progressive so actually the lines are not all shown at once, they are shown progressivly i.e sequentially one after the other all in the same frame though. Seeing as the bbc is a tv broadcaster, and this is in the technology blog, which is going to be the source of info from ces you mgiht get your facts right or something right.

1080p? Pfft!
The real problem is that "HD Ready" TVs have no HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) connector - and you can't add one later.

1080i and 1080p resolution content will only be delivered via HDMI connectors, so if you bought a set without HDMI, tough.

You will be able to playback HD video on non-HDMI TVs, but the content will be deliberately downgraded (blurred and distorted) to protect the precious content from you. They won't call you a thief, but they'll punish you just in case.

HDMI Type B allows up to 2048p resolution, but won't be available until most consumers have bought into HDMI Type A. Future-proof? They're /way/ ahead of you.

First, high-definition TV is not a multiple of either NTSC or PAL in terms of resolution or frames per second, so pictures will be distorted. It would have been infinitely saner to go for an image which mapped directly to everything that already exists.

Second, the resolutions being offered are all substandard. Computer monitors have offered higher definition, higher frame rates and even better contrast for many years now.

Third, the video feed is archaic. Didn't MPEG-2 go out with punched tape and the clay writing tablet? We live in an age where 48 bits per pixel is considered adequate for movies, where 8-channel 26-bit sound chips can be bought cheap off the web, where the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ's own DIRAC is closer to "high definition" than you will ever see the cable and satellite companies offering.

"High Definition", as it stands, is not tomorrow's world. It is yesterday's failure. Tomorrow's world will make IMAX look as awe-inspiring as a 60s newsreel does today. 108" monitors should be in the gigapixel range. Right now, they're outclassed by a cheap corner-store digital camera!

Give me a reason to be inspired, here, rather than in despair at the waste of the potential of all this technology.

Hi - I have an old 28" (square!)Panasonic set which has a fantastic picture, great sound,all the news readers look normal and not squashed like on some wide screen tvs and when I want to watch a film in widescreen, I change the format in the set up menue.
Life can be so simple if you just let it!

Response to Terry Browning:

I thought the difference between HD-ready monitors and HDTVs was that HDTVs possessed a built-in HD tuner so that you could connect coaxial from the network and immediately view HD broadcasts. HD-ready monitors can display an HD signal, but they cannot process it. The HD tuner is supplied to you by a cable or satellite company, so viewers with those services need not purchase an HDTV, only an HD-ready monitor.

I just bought a 32" HD-ready monitor from Toshiba which has an HDMI input jack, but maybe the situation is different in the UK. (We get HD cable, so the cable company rents us an external tuner, which would be necessary regardless of HD-ready or HDTV.) And the HD-ready monitors do not "downgrade" the signal coming from component video and audio cables. The reason you get blurriness is because the cables and the signals they carry are analog, which is inherently noisier than the digital cable and the digital signal you get with HDMI. I agree, HDMI makes a difference, since you have this great signal coming into your tuner, and a great display to show it, but then you lose quality just in the few feet between the tuner and the display. But I do not suspect anything nefarious...just the difference between analog and digital signals.

"And the HD-ready monitors do not "downgrade" the signal coming from component video and audio cables."

The monitors do not downgrade but the players will. That is part of both HD-DVD and BD specifications. Closing the analogue hole. On you.

That is where one of the scam components are - they will do it quietly and a lot of people don't know the difference between the downgraded and full-bandwidth picture, so they will still think they are watching "HD".

Another scam - most of the "HD" content is nothing but upsampled SD (standard definition). Again, people not knowing the technical details would think they are getting "HD" where in fact they see the same old stuff only made worse by the upscaling and deinterlacing.

Terry Browning wrote...
"The real problem is that "HD Ready" TVs have no HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) connector "

For the record, this is bull. Go down to your local electronics store, and have a look at the back of the HD-Ready TVs before making such half-cocked statements. I recently bought an HD-Ready LCD, and it (along with the four others I was thinking about) all had multiple HDMI inputs.

Yes

Use of the 'HD Ready' label requires Component and some form of digital (and HDCP capable) input.... either DVI or HDMI.

There are plenty of opportunities out there for people to purchase non HD-Ready TVs which are usually labelled in a misleading way. 'HD Compatible' is one of the tricks employed.

You're a journalist for tomorrow's world and you didn't know about 1080p last year? This blog is in trouble.

You're never going to compete with the likes of gizmodo.com or engadget.com

I think the whole point is that it's the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ and not engadget etc.

The average Joe Punter does not know these technical details but he may be looking at the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ site now and saying "hey, that's what I've been missing all along - the 1080p!" and "wow, how they were screwing me with these DRMs and I didn't have any idea!"

Having watched my HD TV signal, I can say that it's way better than the old digital cable, if only because the new signal actually has a resolution commensurate to the screen size. And I've looked at the same signal coming over component video and HDMI, and there was definitely analog blurriness up close from the component video.

Of course, if you don't have an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player with matching media you won't be getting the true potential of HD. That is, I think, a separate issue. I was speaking of broadcast, cable, and satellite. Basically, I hardly think that my cable company would eat through bandwidth sending me an awesome signal and then downgrade it in the tuner. And quite frankly, my picture is good enough as it is; I would not want to pay for any more bandwidth or sacrifice my cable modem bandwidth.

The biggest scam however, is the price of cables - HDMIs in particular - at retail stores. Please, please, please buy your cables online.

I realised this fact just last weekend when I found that my 15 inch laptop screen has the same number of pixels as the most expensive of current "HD Ready" TVs! However, I know for a fact that my laptop is not full HD because whenever I try to watch a Quicktime HD clip, the screen is not big enough. Personally, I think everyone should stick to budget-priced TVs for now, and upgrade to full HDTV when Freeview HD becomes widely available (about 5 years yet).

Some people are confused here! I am no techie but 'HD Ready'means a TV must display a picture in 720p format which I believe is 720 vertical pixels by 1368 horizontal, so 1080p is in fact a large step up! (1080 X 1920 pixels)

Also for everone's information you can watch HDTV on some non HD ready sets, I have a 3 year old Sony which displays 1080i pictures perfectly from my SKY HD box through it's analouge component input! (It does not even have HDMI)

There are a lot of people out there who have no clue what 'HD Ready' is or what pixels are, when these people walk into a shop the sales man quickley pounce on the trying to sell them the biggest Screen within their budget without educating them about the difference and only for the customer to find out its old technolgy 6months after they have bought it. Its the duty of Manaufacturer or the seller to educate.

Please bring back Tomorrows World on the TV.It was the best

Please bring back Tomorrows World in HD but please please please DONT DUMB IT DOWN!!!