OK, I've expressed here my reservations about HDTV, at

least as demonstrated at the local Sears and Best Buy

stores, where rows of mediocre pictures can be seen on

various HDTV models, with soft, "globby" images and

poor text-sharpness passed off as an improvement over

my sharp-looking old 27" and 20" TVs (with one 50"

Pioneer plasma HDTV being about the only exception),

and I've assumed that the lower-than-Mini-DV data-rate

of broadcast HDTV had a lot to do with this, and that if

SD Mini-DV shows "painful" artifacting, that the much

greater data density (and resultant much higher

compression ratio) of HDTV would look worse. I've

also assumed that the SD-DV I've produced would look

at least OK displayed in the middle of an HDTV

display...

Well, the "light" struck recently when a friend invited

me over to see his new HDTV theater system. I expected

his relatively-inexpensive LCD projector (a $2000

Panasonic 1/2-1080i resolution one) to show the usual

"chain-link fence" pattern I had seen before, or the

weak color, mushy definition, low d-max etc. that I

had also seen. We started with a DVD of Star Wars II,

which looked much better than I expected on the 8'x4.5'

grey-painted screen, viewed at about 9' - with surprising

detail (though this looks good on my 27", even off a

VHS tape...), good color, weak blacks (viewed in the dark),

and very low level of compression-artifacting. Next we

looked at a dish-received broadcast of a "flight over

British Columbia". The detail was nothing short of

AMAZING!!! To the corners of the close-viewed 8' screen

(where, BTW, the 16x9 looked "right", and I now withdraw

my "Bandaid-view" and "slot-view" comments about

16:9...;-), one could see not only distant trees on hillsides

crisply-rendered, but the branches! Rock-detail, fences,

distant signs, etc. all looked crisp on this BIG screen!

All was good but the blacks, so I asked if we could

adjust settings (which had been centered). Maxing

the contrast and minimizing the brightness on this

PT-L300U Panasonic projector (total cost of the visual

parts of this system were about $2500 - with a really

good [NOT standard-commercial!] sound-system added...)

about satisfied me for image brilliance, and I enjoyed

flying around BC...!;-) Notable was the COMPLETE LACK

of visible compression and motion artifacting...

We next watched a small Mini-DV production I had made,

using highest-quality 3-CCD "handycam-style" camcorders.

I had hoped that in a future HDTV era that all my work

in SD DV would look good enough centered on good

HDTV displays. It looked terrible, with annoying

artifacting galore! Color was excellent, but it did

not look sharp (except for the annoying stair-stepping,

"scan-line flapping", etc. I was VERY disappointed.

It may be that the conversion from 480 lines to 540

lines may have been a problem, and it may be that with

line-doubling and interpolation that a useful output can

be saved, but......, this was very disheartening. I have

seen this material look good on large SD displays,

though, so maybe there is hope...;-)

Next we tried a bit of SD CNN. It looked soft, with

considerable variation in the sharpness of included

video clips (running from soft to mush), but there was

little artifacting (even 340-lines max. looked better

than the 500-lines or so of the best of the SD DV...).

Finally, we watched a dish-received HDTV-broadcast

movie (Ocean's Eleven). By now, I was used to the

VERY-close-to-projected-35mm-look of HDTV, so it was

not a surprise that I was more aware of the film grain

in the original film than I was of the tiny DV pixels

(generally evident only at the edges of diagonal parts

of white text against black...).

Latter I saw an HDTV broadcast of a Spanish street

festival. Moving close to this big screen, the detail

held surprisingly well - I could see stitching in

clothing, read the text on a microphone someone was

holding, look down and see (and be able to identify

some of) the litter in the gutter, etc. This was

SHARP!!! This was FAR BETTER than my Mini-DV efforts.

This is GOOD (but now, what all that effort and money

put into Mini-DV.....?).

Sigh...!

Well, I learned a few things....