Confused - I am !!

Confused - I am !!

I have put off buying into the AV market for three or four years. OK, I have a Pioneer DV-717 and a Sony 28" crt Trinitron colour telly. I feed the audio signal to both the Sony and the Naim 52. The picture is good and the sound is good. The quality of the source material, as always, is critical. Naim's dvd of Antonio sounds superb and the picture is very good.

Nevertheless, I would like a nice 42" or 50 " plasma to replace the Sony and I would like a jolly good projector to beam an 8' cinema-like picture onto a screen with the sound being fed via a 5.1 or 7.1 system with superb LFE dynamics for both action-movies and music-movies.

The AV industry has finally published some standards.

HD means almost anything over 540i. But lets face it, REAL HD means 1080p.

Why can't the industry admit this? 720p might be good, but I want 1080p and I want to be told CLEARLY what I am being offered.

At Bristol (I was only able to spend about 4 hours there), several plasma companies were demonstrating 1080 screens.

Fujitsu had a truly excellent array of screens from 42" up to 63". However, trying to get the guy on the stand to explain the difference between 1024 x 1024 and 1386 x 768 pixel and how these might relate to 1920 x 1080 was like pulling out back teeth. The teeth are still firmly in place!

The projector teams were a little better. The Sim2 team had several models on display with plenty of talk about their 1920 x 1080 projectors. But you had to be careful not to mix these with the price of their 1280 x 720 jobbies. Mind you, the 720p models at £2,500 (show price) gave the £6k models a good run for their money in the subjective viewing department..

But Sim were quick to point out that pixel specs weren't the be-all and end-all of projectors. The optics are also important (well - yes !), as was the 10-bit processor. So why were they not using custom-made lenses like Projection Design and the six-colour wheels like Projection Design also?? Well, to be fair, the guy did say that they would be introducing the six-colour wheel later this year. But this was only after a lot of pushing. Back teeth still firmly in place.

All the manufacturers emphasised their scalers could scale virtually anything. From a lowly terestial BBC1 to 1080p or from 1080i to 1080p. Sort of implying that if you hooked their display up to anything that could spin a dvd or capture BBC 1, they could turn it into glorious 70mm Technicolour or better

But my biggest bug-bear………..I put a simple, straightforward question to several manufacturers.

"What source material are you using to produce these fantastic images ? and what source retrieval equipment are you using to retrieve this source material ?"

Most readily stated that it was 1080p……….

OK, "so is it on dvd, and played back via Blu-ray or HD DVD or what?"
With the back teeth half out, most stated that it was stored was on a hard drive and retrieved by some sort of computer system.

And finally, "where can I buy or procure this sort of 1080p material to put onto a hard drive ?" - "you can't sir. At least not for another couple of years, or until the film industry has figured out a copyright protection system that is foolproof"

Back teeth firmly in place again.

I tell you, its like pulling back teeth out trying to get straight answers to simple questions about what is available and what is on offer and what is just around the corner.

Informed choice - no chance!

So the money stays firmly in the pocket

I was informed by a usually reliable source, that his company felt the industry might well by-pass Blu-ray and HD DVD and move directly to down-loading to hard drives, presumably at 1080p. But I might have mis-understood this information.

Anybody out there any more confident than me as to where we are and where we are going?

Cheers

Don