[stella] HDTV (OT)

Subject: [stella] HDTV (OT)
From: Glenn Saunders <cybpunks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 22:52:10 -0700
At 08:43 PM 5/31/2000 -0500, you wrote:
What I wonder is if we'll HAVE to keep old TVs aroudn if we want to
keep playing our old games without having to rely on emulation.--

I don't think that will be necessary.


It would be suicide for HDTV monitors to refuse NTSC connections since it will be decades before the consumer flushes themselves of all their NTSC stuff. NTSC is still alive and well, analog or digital. DVD is still a relatively new format, for instance, as well as the digital camcorder formats like miniDV and Digital8. Backwards compatibility with the 50+ years of analog television material out there is a no-brainer, and shouldn't be tremendously difficult or expensive to implement. A lot of video cards for the PC throw in the TV tuner/video in port as a freebie. That kind of technology is quite inexpensive now, and would be a trivial add-on to even cost-reduced regular (as opposed to the exclusively big sets on sale now) HDTV sets in the future. The video decoder/encoder chips are made in massive quantities and are already really cheap. I'm sure current HDTV sets already have composite Y/C NTSC inputs. If they don't, they are just stupid...

Even when HDTV starts to take over, it will be a long while before content catches up with the availability of HDTV TVs. HDTV cameras and VCRs are prohibitively expensive. Editing HDTV is also expensive. There are no desktop video editing solutions, for instance, for HDTV. Until that happens, even if the big budget stuff shifts to HDTV, smallish independent video and low budget stuff will remain NTSC by economic necessity. And they will either bump it up to HDTV for broadcast and distribution, or rely on backwards compatibility (more likely).


Glenn Saunders - Producer - Cyberpunks Entertainment Personal homepage: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698 Cyberpunks Entertainment: http://cyberpunks.uni.cc


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