The Big Picture

As many of you know, I appear as a regular guest on The Tech Guy, a nationally syndicated call-in radio talk show hosted by Leo Laporte. The show airs live on Saturdays and Sundays from 11 AM to 2 PM Pacific time; some stations carry all or part of the show live, while others play the recording at different times. My segment is usually on Sundays right after the 11:30 AM news break, when I talk about home theater and answer reader and listener questions.

On February 5 and 6, I had the incredible opportunity to sit in for Leo as the guest host of The Tech Guy for the entire show. Leo was on vacation for three weeks, and I happened to be in the San Francisco Bay Area during that weekend, so we agreed that I would host the show from his studio, answering phone questions about—what else?—home theater.

Dolby was showing several items in its booth, including an update to Dolby Digital Plus for mobile devices as well as its LED-backlit LCD professional reference monitor with local-dimming control of each LED rather than larger zones—very cool, but very expensive. What interested me the most was Dolby 3D, a new technology developed in collaboration with Philips Research and introduced at NAB.

And now for something completely over the top—an autostereoscopic (glasses-free) 16:9 rear-projection display measuring 200 inches diagonally! This behemoth was developed by Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and consists of 200 small DLP projectors behind a special diffuser screen and Fresnel lens. Amazingly, you can walk around and see objects from different angles and even behind them, much like a true hologram. There was some obvious vertical banding in the 1920x1080 image, but I found no one who could explain why.

The most important consumer-related product introduction at NAB was a new projector and source device from Red Digital Cinema, which is best known for its digital-cinema cameras. As its name implies, the REDray Laser Projector uses lasers as its illumination source, and the red, green, and blue lasers are housed in a separate module (the larger box seen directly above the projector in the photo) that connects to the projector itself via fiber optics. Even more interesting, multiple laser modules can be ganged together to produce more light for larger screens, and the lasers are rated to last more than 25,000 hours with virtually no change in color or light output.

Last Thursday, Ken Florance, Director of Content Delivery at Netflix, posted the results of a very interesting study on the Netflix Tech Blog. The company measured the effective throughput speed of its HD streams as delivered by many ISPs in the US and Canada from the first of October to the middle of January. The US results are shown above, while the Canadian results are shown below.

If there's a choice between convenience and quality, convenience usually wins out. The best example of this is the sad tale of DVD-Audio and SACD vs. MP3, all of which were introduced at roughly the same time. The convenience of quickly downloading MP3s into portable players easily trumped the vastly superior quality of DVD-A and SACD. Granted, the skirmish between the two high-res audio formats didn't help, but I suspect the outcome would have been much the same even if there had been no competition at the high end. So what's an audiophile to do?

Well, it seems the DTV transition will not be delayed after all. The Senate voted on Monday to allow stations to shut down analog broadcasting at any time between February 17 and June 12, but the House of Representatives defeated that bill today.