TV Pixel Growth

It sounds like a terrible disease.
TV Pixel Growth. Hope I don't
get it.

TV pixel growth is the growing
number of pixels found on your TV
screen. The more pixels, the better
the visual resolution of the TV.

It's an over-simplification, but pixels
are really details. The more pixels
you have (and the better the quality of
the pixels), the more detail you can see
on your TV screen.

Quantitatively, pixels are measured by
how many you have. Qualitatively, pixels
are measured by things like contrast ratios.

One thing you can be sure of in life. The
more quantitative something is, the easier it
is to measure. The more qualitative something
is, the harder it is to measure.

For example, it is very easy to measure how tall
you are or how much you weight. Quantity is easy!
What's much harder to measure is whether or not
you are a good person. Also, it can be hard to
measure how good you are at something. Quality
is much harder to measure than quantity.

So it is with TV pixels. It is much easier to
measure how many pixels you have on your TV than
it is to measure whether the pixels are any good
or not.

Pixels have been growing. The TV sets we had
for the first 50 years of television's existence
had 480 lines in the United States. Those 480
lines are roughly equivalent to 480 vertical
pixels.

Think of old old TVs as being 480p. Modern
digital TVs are either 720p or 1080p. Pixels
have been growing.

The rate of pixel growth per generation of TV
technology seems to be 50 percent. 720p is
50 percent more vertical lines than 480p.
1080p is 50 percent more vertical lines than
720p.

There has been a rather fascinating change that
has taken place in the last ten years. Whereas
the first generation TVs stayed stuck at 480p
for 50 years or so, the last 10 years have seen
us go through 2 more generations of television
visual resolution.

720p and 1080p have come one behind the other
rather quickly.

I could be wrong but I suspect that we may plateau
at 1080p for quite some time. The reason I think
this, and I admit it is not all that great a reason,
is that it will take quite some time for content to
be available that exceeds 1080p.

The reason why I could be very very wrong about this
is that historically, software has always lagged behind
hardware. However, as computer hardware becomes available,
people always seem to find a use for it.

Your TV is hardware. The content that you watch on TV
is in some sense software. If televisions become available
that have a greater resolution that 1080p, will people buy
them? Probably. You can always find someone who is willing
to spend money on the latest and the greatest.

If enough TVs are out there that can handle content greater
than 1080p, then someone will probably produce content
greater than 1080p.

It's a funny thought, but the first market for greater than
1080p could be home movies. If you can afford a TV that
can deliver greater than 1080p, why not buy a video camera
that can do the same?

In the case of home movies, both production and distribution
are done in house. Therefore the whole end-to-end operation
is an in-house operation.

While I do expect the world to plateau a while at 1080p, I
can't help but think that home movies will someday take us
beyond 1080p.

The more things change, the more things stay the same. There's
always someone out there that is pushing us all to take the
next step.

Ed Abbott

Figuring Out Pixels On My TV

Digital TVs have pixels. These
are little squares or rectangles
that turn on and off.

Turn the pixel all the way on and
it is white. Turn the pixel all
the way off and it is black.

Turn the pixel halfway off and it
is grey. Grey is halfway between
black and white.

What if you want something other
than black, white or grey? For
this you have to turn off and
on certain colors.

A pixel actually consists of 3
colors: red, green, and blue. If
all 3 are turned on all the way,
you get a pure white color. If
all 3 are turned off all the way,
you get pure black.

If all 3 are turned on halfway,
you get grey. Black, white,
and grey are all 3 colors appearing
to your eye in perfect balance.

I find it interesting that the
only way to make a color appear
on a TV screen is to unbalance
the colors. For example, to get
bright red, you turn the red aspect
of the pixel all the way up and
you turn the other 2 aspects ---
green and blue --- all the way
down.

Some colors are derived by turning
on more than one color. For example,
bright yellow is achieved by turning
red and green to their maximum brightness
and turning blue completely off.

The more you mix the 3 colors -- red
green and blue --- the more color choices
you have. A digital TV is capable of
millions of different colors.

How many pixels does your digital TV have
to work with? It depends on your TV. Some
digital TVs are 720p TVs and some digital
TVs are 1080p TVs.

A 720p digital TV has 720 pixels to work
with in its vertical dimension. A 1080p
TV measures 1,080 pixels vertically. Yes,
you can measure your TV screen in pixels.

When you measure your TV with pixels, you
are not measuring inches or centimeters,
you are measuring pixel density. A 1080p
TV has more pixels per inch than does a
720P TV -- if both TVs are otherwise the
same size as they sit in your room.

All HDTV televisions are wider than they
are tall. The ratio of width to height
is 16 to 9. A 720p TV is 720 pixels tall
and 1280 pixels wide.Multiply the two
numbers together and you get the total
number of pixels on the screen.

720p is sometimes referred to as 1280 X 720.
1280 X 720 is the width times the height.
Multiply these 2 numbers together and you
get 921,600 pixels.

That's almost one million pixels. Therefore,
720p is roughly equivalent to a one megapixel
still camera. That is to say, each frame of
of video shot at 720p is, roughly speaking,
one megapixel.

An interesting aspect of Samsung's 720p is
that they actually give you a few more
pixels than 720. The actual aspect ratio
of the 720p Samsung TVs that I've looked
at is 1366 x 768.

The extra pixels are probably there to match
what Samsung offers in its computer monitors.
Rather than manufacture 2 sizes that are similar,
it appears to me that Samsung has settled on
1366 x 768 as a resolution that is slightly better
than 720p. However, instead of calling it
something else, Samsung calls it 720p.

Where does Samsung get the number 768 from?
It appears to me that this is a variation on
an old format which was 1024 X 768. Sometime
back, 1024 X 768 was the dominant computer
monitor size. It still is.

As of July 2011, 18 percent of the internet
browsing public still has monitors that are
1024 X 768. That's almost 1 in 5 people.

Back in December of 2007, 46 percent of the
Internet browsing public had 1024 X 768
monitors. Back then, almost 1 in 2 people
had 1024 X 768 monitors.

Again, in December of 2007, .02 percent
of the Internet browsing public had 1080p
monitors. That's 2 out of every 10 thousand
people.

1080p monitors are computer monitors that
have a screen resolution of 1920 X 1080.
More about 1080p later.

In July 2011, 4 percent of the Internet
browsing public has 1080p monitors. That's
roughly 1 out of every 25 people.

In 4 years (2007-2011), 1080p computer
monitors have grown from 2 out of every
10 thousand people to 1 out of 25 people.

1080p appears to be taking over the TV market
and is doing very well in the computer
monitor market. Based on what I see being
offered at my favorite online retailer, Newegg,
I expect 1080p to grow dramatically. Most
of the monitors offered at Newegg in August
2011 are 1080p.

In August 2011, the top five sellers at Newegg,
based on the number of reviews by buyers, are all
1080p monitors.

The point? The computer monitor
market and the market for televisions
are intimately connected. More and
more, I see these 2 markets converging.

I see an increasing trend towards TV screens
and computer monitors to have the exact
same screen resolutions. In August 2011,
both the computer monitor market and the
television market appears to be converging
around 1080p.

Her'e my source for computer monitor market
penetration statistics:

NETMARKETSHARE

To find the pages where I gathered information about
computer monitor market share, do the following:

1. Look for the links on the left side of the page
2. Look for Other
3. Under Other, look for Screen Resolutions
4. Click Screen Resolutions
5. When you land on the Screen Resolutions page,
   manipulate the month and year in the upper left-hand corner.
6. Change the month and year to see how the monitor sizes
   that people buy year-to-year changes.

Here's an article that explains different screen
resolutions for HDTV much better than I do:

Quick Guide: HDTV Resolution Explained

The most helpful thing I find about the above article
is the relative unimportance of screen resolution. The
author does a very very good job of pointing out that
other factors are much more important.

This reminds me of something I've often observed and
that is that people place far too much importance on
things that are easy to measure. 720p versus 1080p
is very easy to measure. Therefore, people place a
huge amount of importance on it.

The author of the article points out that contrast ratio
is far more important. This makes total sense.

Think about it: In literature and in history, you often
hear of people traveling at night by the light of a full
moon. Of course, people also travel and move about by
the light of the tropical sun at 12 noon.

The contrast ratio of a full moon illuminating the Earth
versus a tropical sun illuminating the Earth on a clear
day must be at least one million to one. Our eyes are
able to see in bright light and in dim light too.

In other words, our eyes are able to work with some
rather remarkable contrast levels. It therefore makes
total sense that a HDTV with a great contrast ratio is
going to do a far better job of conveying visual information
than a monitor with slightly better visual resolution.

In other words, highlights and shadows are far more
important to visual perception than details are. Yes,
details are important, but without contrast, we would not
see detail anyway. Therefore, without contrast, detail
has no meaning.

Ed Abbott

Buying the Right TV

This is a new blog.

I've been looking into buying
the right TV. One of the things
I'm most interested in is being
as future-proof as possible.

Being future-proof means avoiding
buying a TV that will soon be
obsolete. The old TV standard,
NTSC TV, lasted 60 years. If possible,
I would like to buy a new TV that will
also last a long time.

NTSC TV is the old TV standard that
was in practical existence from the
1940s on. When I say practical existence,
I mean consumers were actually out there
buying TVs based on the NTSC standard
from the late 1940s on.

In Europe, they went with another standard.
The standard there was called PAL. Both
PAL (Europe) and NTSC (United States) have
lasted a long long time.

Here's an article on NTSC:

NTSC

Here's an article on PAL:

PAL

The issue I'm concerned with right now is not
NTSC versus PAL. What is going to replace
these 2 old standards? That's the issue I
care about.

It appears that 1080p is going to replace
NTSC in the United States. Here's an article
that indicates this:

1080p LCD Sets Dominate the Market

Here's the source for the 1080p LCD article:

1080p LCD TVs Take Majority Market Share

Here's the original press release that describes
how 1080p is taking over the market:

In 2010
HD1080p Models Finally Top
the OVERALL LCDTV Category

Here's the great graphic in original form
that shows 1080p LCD TV taking over:

Original 1080P Taking-Over Graphic

Here's the research firm that all the above
information seems to come from:

Quixel Research

It appears to me that the mechanism by which 1080p is taking
over the market is a simple one. The key to a market take-over
is smaller screen sizes.

As the screen sizes for 1080p get smaller, 1080p pushes 720 pixel
out. So this is how 720 HD will die and disappear. As 1080p LCD
TV gets smaller and smaller, no one wants 720 HD anymore. According
to the report, the cost difference between a 1080p LCD TV and and a
720 pixel TV with the same screen diagonal (say 32 inch, for example) is
negligible. Therefore, as soon as 1080p becomes available for a given
screen diagonal measurement, it pushes 720 HD out of the picture (I know,
bad pun).

It's an interesting dynamic. I'm beginning to see how this market works.
All the pushing in the market comes from the top on down. The top-of-the-line
product pushes down into the bottom-of-the-line product.

This is how life works. You get a few people interested in something by
providing a great product or service. At first, only a very high end or
very specialized clientele is interested. Later the market broadens as
more and more people become interested.

You can use this principle to keep yourself in the middle of the river
when you go to buy something. It's probably a good idea not to be the
first person to own technology. Why? Because the longer you wait, the
more reliable and cheaper the technology.

With 1080p LCD TV, it is not too terribly hard to figure out just when
1080p will probably become the middle of the stream. Pick a screen size
that is most like the volume leader in terms of unit sales. For example,
say that a 32 inch diagonal TV plays that role.

First, determine if 32-inch-diagonal LCD TV is the middle of the market
in unit sales. If so, wait until 1080p models appears in the 32-inch-diagonal
LCD TV market. As soon as 1080p makes its appearance in 32 inch TVs at major
retailers, 1080p LCD TV is about to take over the 32-inch market.

It's an interesting dynamic where one after another diagonal screen measurement
is taken over by 1080p starting with the largest TVs and working on down.


Ed Abbott