OPINION: High-def lite
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 8/31/2007
AUG. 31 | I RECENTLY went shopping for a new cell phone to replace the one I’ve been carrier for a few years.
Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda
I was looking for a plain old phone: one that isn’t a music player, a digital camera, a GPS receiver or a Web-enabled handheld computer, because I don’t do any of those things with my cell phone. I have nothing against people who do, they’re just not for me. The phone I carry now has a camera in it, and I’ve taken a grand total of six pictures with it in four years, and two of them were of my ear.
So far, though, I haven’t found what I’m looking for. Features that used to be bells and whistles are now standard. Just try buying a phone without a camera in it. You can’t. While I have no use for a camera in my phone, I accept that many people do, and that a camera has evolved into a standard and expected feature in any basic cell phone.
Something similar is starting to happen with DVD players.
Go to the Best Buy Web site and search DVD players. A sizable majority of the available models include digital “upconversion” circuitry that digitally adds visual information on the screen by repeating some of the video information on the disc as it’s displayed.
As detailed by VB's Ned Randolph, upconversion circuitry is becoming a standard and expected feature in replacement DVD players.
“Just as more consumers adopt HDTVs and have large DVD libraries, they want to optimize on their TV sets purely as the device replacement cycle,” NPD Group analyst Ross Rubin told VB. “Particularly for a segment of the population that has already purchased an HDTV, they’re probably willing to invest $150 for a DVD player as opposed to a $30 player at Target.”
THE UPCONVERSION effect is a trick. The circuits don’t add any actual picture information from what is already on the disc. They simply repeat certain video information as the image is displayed, creating the illusion of greater picture detail.
But to the untrained eye of the average consumer, with a dubiously calibrated 720p HDTV set viewed from the wrong distance at the wrong angle, it’s a pretty good illusion. And as consumers wait out the format war between HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc, it’s becoming the default reference spec for “high-def” DVD.
It doesn’t help that many manufacturers and retailers label upconverting DVD players as “HD” in their advertising, and that the trick only works on an “HD” TV set with an HDMI connection: It’s an “HD” player, connected to my HDTV using an HD cable. It’s HD. What else do I need?
Increasingly, that’s the competition both Blu-ray and HD DVD are up against, at least as much as each other.
The HD DVD camp, in fact, seems focused as much on the upconverter market as on Blu-ray. Determined to capture a share of the current replacement cycle, Toshiba and Microsoft are doing all they can to drive the retail price of HD DVD players down to a level competitive with upconverters.
Toshiba’s entry-level HD DVD player is down to $239 at Amazon and could dip below $200 by Christmas (it’s already at $188 used). Microsoft programmers have been working to get HDi to run on slower, cheaper processors so Chinese manufacturers can take more cost out of the hardware.
The Chinese-made player from Venturer is widely rumored to come in with an MSRP around $150.
Blu-ray faces a tougher task. Higher component costs and greater variability in its spec make it difficult for manufacturers to get retail prices under $400. That means convincing consumers not only that Blu-ray is a better choice than HD DVD, but that the “true HD” experience of blue-laser technology is worth paying three or four times more than they get with an upconverter.
It’s the studios, however, who have the most at stake, because they get nothing out of the upconverter business. It gives consumers no incentive to replace their current DVD library, it does nothing to lift new release prices and has no need for enhanced copy protection. It provides none of the benefits the studios are hoping to reap from the transition to high-def.
Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda. Get more of Sweeting's analysis here.
