Latest News & Knowledge
I read an article this morning about a new venture by ESPN that will be rolling out this year in July. ESPN is launching a new 3D channel which will televise sporting events using the latest in 3D technology. They will air a lot of soccer matches, football games, and some specialty events such as the X games. Having been a part of a large commercial 3D project and having seen recent 3D movie offerings I must say that the technology has come a long way and is absolutely a viable media option. I would go so far as to say that if used correctly, 3D technology enhances the presentation to the point where the review of the presentation would suffer without it. I recently saw two movies where 3D left a lasting impression on me, Avitar and Disney’s Up. Given the story lines and the landscapes that were involved the 3D element added great depth to the “world” and really made the landscape pop to the point that you could really feel how big the space was. 3D technology absolutely brings animation to life to the point where you forget the picture is animated.
For our business we are involved with 3D and it is commercially called immersive stereoscopic 3D technology. The technology is used as a visualization tool to better see and understand the topic at hand. There are many resources available online that can help to better understand how this technology works and where it’s headed. I for one am a fan and I look forward to seeing more in 3D.
Go to http://www.tpi.cc/products.aspx to see 360 degree interactive 3D models of our mediated lectern and teaching station products
As a Red Sox fan I have endured and survived an 8 year relationship with Manny Ramirez. My time with ‘Manny being Manny’ has come to an end. Now that he has moved on there is a lot of reflection on his tenure with the Sox and a lot has been made of his behavior and the toleration of it by the team. Last night I read some of his comments about being dealt to LA and what I read confirmed that the Red Sox did the right thing by dealing him away. His stay in LA less than 24 hours old he claimed that LA is a wonderful city and he wants to finish his career as a Dodger. He also noted his tremendous respect for the Dodgers organization and the energy of the fans. He has finally found the peace that he has been looking for. I believe we are seeing a high profile example of what happens everyday in the workplace and if we look closely we find Mannys all over place. Employees who for one reason or another work themselves into discontentment and ultimately lash out at their employer and burn the bridge as they pass over it on the way out.
The problem I see is that owners and employers are also responsible for creating these monsters because they constantly overlook the behavior in favor of the talent and as the behavior deteriorates they don’t do anything about it until its too late. As they say, when your winning everything looks good and nothings a problem. I think that management should have an unwavering commitment toward acceptable conduct and behavior and when that policy is violated then the employee is removed. In the moment this always seems hard to do but time and time again I have seen companies survive the seperation and pick up the pieces and move on. Often times for the better. 48 hours into this I can say I’m glad it happened and I know the Sox will be better for it. They’ll pick up the pieces, still win the Series, and move on! Manny in LA? Good luck with that!
As the media world increasingly transitions from broadcasting standard definition to high definition images, the invariable question arises as to which display technology is superior, LCD or plasma. I personally have been asked some version of this question in almost every client meeting I attend. Considering that the hype and popularity surrounding flat-panel displays has now definitively swept through corporate boardrooms and into the living rooms of America, I would like to offer up the true ‘facts’ underlying each technology as well as my opinion on the matter.
Plasma
Plasma screens are basically composed of a network of pixels mounted between two thin layers of glass. Each individual pixel is itself a triad of red, green, and blue phosphors, a substance that itself emits light when struck by light of certain wavelengths (as by ultraviolet). Plasma screens work by using a small electric pulse to excite the rare natural gases contained in each pixel (argon, neon, and xenon) which in turn produce the visible color information and light. As electrons excite these phosphors oxygen atoms dissipate to create plasma (a unique phase of matter distinct from solids, liquids, and normal gases), emitting ultraviolet (UV) light. This light emitted by the phosphors is the same light we see from the viewing end.
Now as if all that isn’t cool enough, check this out: because all the phosphor-excited pixels react simultaneously, there is never any screen flicker apparent to the viewer. There’s also no backlight and no projection of any kind in plasma technology, so the light-emitting phosphors produce an unmediated, bright display with rich color and a wide viewing angle.
LCD
Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs) use a fluorescent backlight to send light through modules of liquid crystal and a polarizing surface, usually glass panels. The result is the production of a state in which rays of light (or similar radiation) exhibit different properties in different directions. In addition, the passive LCD has a grid of conductors with pixels located at each intersection in the grid. A current is sent across two conductors on the grid to control the light for any one pixel.
To display a color image, an LCD must have three subpixels—red, green, and blue color filters—to create each color pixel.
Through the careful control and variation of the voltage applied, the intensity of hue in each subpixel can range over 256 shades. Thus, combining the subpixels produces a possible palette of 16.8 million colors (256 shades of red x 256 shades of green x 256 shades of blue). As you can imagine, these color displays require an enormous number of transistors. For example, a typical laptop computer supports screen resolutions up to 1,024×768 pixels. If we multiply 1,024 columns by 768 rows by 3 subpixels each, we get a total of 2,359,296 individual transistors etched onto the glass! If there is a problem with any of these 2.3 million plus transistors, it results in a “bad pixel” on the display. (Most active matrix displays have a few bad pixels scattered across the screen.)
Now that we know a bit more about how each display works, which is to be preferred for high def. viewing? There may not be an uncontested “right” answer to that question, but we can list for you some of the advantages and disadvantages intrinsic to each display technology:
Plasma Advantages
- Excellent (real) contrast ratios and black levels
- Excellent color reproduction
- Excellent life expectancy
- Excellent viewing angle with no real loss of color or contrast
Plasma Disadvantages
- Fixed screen resolution
- Although thin, plasma TVs are fairly heavy
- Susceptible to screen burn-in (although many newer models compensate with various screen-saving methods)
- Lower real peak brightness compared to LCD
- Uses a lot of power compared to LCD
LCD Advantages
- Good color reproduction and improving contrast (high contrast tied to peak brightness capability however)
- Very thin
- Relatively lightweight with flexible mounting options
- Perfect sharpness at native resolution
- Excellent longevity
- Among the brightest direct view displays
- Highest resolutions possible (1080p for maximum high definition viewing)
- No practical screen burn-in effect as with plasma displays
- Silent with no moving parts or fans
LCD Disadvantages
- Fixed screen resolution
- Notorious “screen door” effect on lesser models (mostly smaller mobile displays)
- Very difficult to produce deep blacks (though LED backlighting is bringing improvement)
- Expensive cost-to-size ratio compared to other technologies
Happily, while the sizes of plasmas and LCDs continue to increase (I have personally beheld up to a 104-inch plasma display and a 70-inch LCD) the overall price of each display type continues to drop, making LCDs and plasmas ever more affordable. My industry experience says that plasma displays have a clear advantage in corporate market share, but with the screen dimensions enlarging and prices shrinking LCDs are carving away at said market share quite quickly.
I have talked with both ‘purists’ who swear LCD is superior to plasma because it’s brighter and ‘experts’ who argue plasma is superior to LCD because of its greater contrast.
In my mostly unbiased and impartial (and humble) opinion however, my display of choice is still plasma, believing it currently to have a better overall image quality and more aggressive price point than LCDs. Check back in six months however, as this ‘humble’ opinion may have swung in the other direction.
The trend in today’s technology is to design and develop multifunctional, appliance-type boxes to do just about everything you can think of. The theory is that this approach minimizes cost, space, power consumption, and complication. But is it worth it?
The perception is this makes it easy to buy and use technology, and in most cases it certainly doesn’t hurt. But what about an application where the one feature you need the box doesn’t have? This could be a deal breaker. Ultimately we arrive at an unhappy crossroads: does the client live without what he most needs or do you use duct tape and chicken wire as a workaround?
The fact remains that in most applications the integrator still has tremendous value. This is primarily because, instead of simply settling for what comes out of the box, he can design and develop solutions specifically tailored to the client’s needs. There hasn’t been one system we’ve done this year where a single device has solved all of our problems. Furthermore, I believe that most boxes that profess to “do it all” actually sacrifice a great deal of quality and efficiency. In other words, in their effort to do all things in one they sacrifice doing any one thing well. That is why we still design with application-specific devices hand-picked to meet the exact needs of our client. Our expertise in the integration of those various pieces is ultimately what yields a superior result for our client and sets us apart as a company. Are we worthy? Yes, so long as we listen to the needs of our clients and then design and develop our audio-visual systems with those particular needs in mind.
This is the third adaptation of the book by Richard Matheson and I hope the best of the three. The second, the Omega Man, is still one of my favorite movies of all time. Given the situation I wonder what I would do and how I would do it. I was in the car a few weeks ago with some eleven old boys, had no idea this movie was coming out, and happened to ask what they would do if they were the last people on earth. What would be the first thing, the second thing, etc… To hear an eleven year old think it through is quite amusing. To say the least I don’t think my first stop would be to Best Buy to pick up Halo 3 because I didn’t want to get bored. I think the first thing I would do is heavily arm myself, you know, just in case.
In recent months I’ve been asked this question many times and I really didn’t have an answer each time it was asked. Now that it looks like we’ve pretty much passed the point of no return where it seems less and less likely that a compromise will be reached on a next-generation format for DVD I finally feel compelled to actually consider what my answer might be. It seems like as long as I’ve been alive there are these epic battles being waged. First it was VHS vs. Beta, then it was (and still is) PC vs. Mac, and now Blu-ray vs HD-DVD.
Anyway, Here’s some data from Netflix…
- Among the 14 million monthly average visitors to Netflix.com during those three recent months, only 0.3% viewed either of the two competing high-definition genres.
- Those who looked at Blu-ray titles outnumber those looking at HD-DVD by a factor of 1.8 to 1.
- Those who set an HD format as their preferred format selected HD-DVD over Blu-ray by a factor of 2.4 to 1.
- Those who looked at the HD-DVD genre were 4.4 times more likely than Blu-ray browsers to actually set this as their preferred format.
- Over this time period, Blu-ray adoption rates have remained flat while HD-DVD has grown.
What’s my take? Well, I read this morning that Sony is making it easier to obtain the development kit for the PS3 because it wants to bolster the sales of this slumping product and because this product is a major part of their Blu-ray efforts. That tells me that they are not as successful as they thought they would be and the Netflix data seems to support this thought.
I think that essentially the studios will determine who the winner is and so far there is no clear favorite. The studios are not leaning one way or another right now and the majority of the new DVD format business is coming from new releases only. Given the price of the players I can see why most consumers are sitting on the sidelines waiting for this thing to shake out.
Ultimately I agree with Peter Jackson, the Oscar-winning director of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy and the King Kong remake, who predicts both formats will be losers. “In this case,” he told the Toronto Sun, “I suspect neither format will win. I think they’ll both just exist and serve for a few years until eventually DVD itself becomes a thing of the past.” I think that technology is moving so fast that by the time either format gets any traction a whole new medium will emerge making both obsolete. It will most likely skip right over to downloadable content and a new form of digital player will emerge the dominant medium.
