Tivo Series3: Availability 9/17/2006 @ $799 MSRP?

Advertisements

and again the mass market is not exactly sticking 61" screens on the wall. please reference the part where I said it sounded absurd to the reader of this thread and me. I already know and see the difference but HD does not just sell itself becasue of better resolution to a LARGE market. So HD and Ble Ray and S3 will have a larger sticker price on them still.

eventually the better resolution will become standard becasue given all other factors the same then a better spec will win. Last I looked 61' screens had a few factors different from a 27 inch CRT

 

Not so !! I have a 65" Optoma HDTV and when I first got it the cable co gave me HBO HD for two months. HBO-HD played a movie I also had in DVD. I recorded the HBO in HD on my Moto HD DVR and played back both at the same time, there was a difference when I switch TV inputs but not much of one. By setting up your DVD player for 16:9 you get 30% more resolution then a normal TV signal. The difference was too small for me to buy a HD DVD for now. Most people that saw the DVD thought is was HD.

 

Les,

What inputs were you feeding to your TV? What was the output signal from the Moto Box set to? Was the movie actually in HD, not all movies aired on HBO HD are in HD, and not all of those that are aired are decent quality HD. Star Wars III was an exception and was an awesome HD feed.

I call tell the difference between my DVD player, an UpConverting DVD player (fair amount better - but not HD quality), my HTPC UpConverting and feeding TV via DVI (even better than 'Good' Upconverting DVD players - still no HD), then Real HD - Totally Awesome.

If you can't tell a significant difference then you've got problems. Either you're feeding your TV with a bad feed (Moto box setup, Feeding TV w/ S-video or Composite video (i.e. using SD feeds), Movie that you watched and compared wasn't actually HD - always a possibility), your HDTV is f'd up, or you seriously need an eye exam.

CCourtney

 

Advertisements

Ha! Tell the difference? I definitely can see the difference. But y'know what? It's still just marketing and sales! (Which rhymes with sails, so it's time to ship 'em out, no?)

Spend $10,000 (or less) on audio and it's hard to tell the difference between some musical performances and live performers. Spend that (or even $50,000) and there's no doubt whatsoever that what you're seeing is an amazingly crisp huge moving picture, but it will never be mistaken for live!

Holographic 3D TV and associated DVR's which could trick you into actually believing that their displays are "live" are probably less than 25 years away, plus perhaps five years more before they reach an equivalent price point to today's $2000 offerings.

It's all just hype! Nobody needs it, but a lot of us can be talked into wanting it.

 

They only way to reliably demonstrate the difference between the various TV formats is to make a side by side comparison. This can almost never be arranged in any mass market store. Even under perfect conditions some people are still not going to see or appreciate the difference. Also consider the fact that obtaining the most perfect HD image is still a rather tricky pursuit and that one has to do a lot of research to succeed. If you build the perfect 1080p system you'll get breathtaking images. However, if you try to view SD on that system it's going to look bad - period. I think most of us can be happy with a 720p system because we will be living in a mixed resolution world for quite some time. A 720p display will look great with almost any HD feed and should still present an acceptable SD image as well. At one point I was staunchly insisting that my next TV would be a 1080p native display - now I am reconsidering. This article cleared up a few things for me:

http://www.hdtvexpert.com/pages_b/1080p_a_year_later.html

Of particular interest is the fact that Blu Ray and HD-DVD store the images at 1080p/24 which is a frame rate almost no display will support. This means that a messy conversion has to take place inside the player before you can get a watchable image on your monitor. I hate stuff like that.

I also agree that it is very likely the HD disc players will become ubiquitous not by overwhelming demand, but rather by SD-DVD players no longer being sold. It might take a while for that to happen too.

 

My HD TV is two years old and has res. of only 720 X 1280 which I know is not as good as the new 1080i HD TVs now, but it looks dam good to me, Leno's show is specular at least compared to the output of TiVo DVD unit using the component cables. The DVD player is connected by component cables to a SD input on the TV. This TV has a state-of-the-art deinterlacing (their spelling not mine) so the DVD is setup for 480i at 16:9 as the TV manual said to do. The cable box is connected by a HDMI to DVI (on the TV) cable. The HBO movie was HD and looked better then the DVD but not knock your socks off better. The HD on this TV compared to a normal input is knock your socks off better. I am thrilled with the system as it is, but I know better is out there (1080p). I will have to see the difference someday at a showroom. I will not be replacing this TV for many years and see no need ti invest in a HD-DVD now.

 

I have a HD capable TV in my house, and guess what, I NEVER watch the HD channels at all. Why? Because I would have to pay shitcast even more money for stuff that I should already be getting as part of the monthly gouging they get from me every month. There is simply no reason for me to have to pay them an additional $11.95/month to get 35 channels in HD that I already get as part of my normal cable package. Until they quit trying to double bill me for channels, I won't care about HD and never will, and incidentally I didn't buy the TV, it was given to me as a birthday gift.

 

That's just one format the discs support. And it isn't new - many DVDs are 480p/24. 3:2 pulldown is a common trick and it doesn't really mean that much.

Blu-ray can also do 1080p/30 and 1080p/60, for example. 24fps is common because that's the framerate of film. So the best direct conversion of flim is 24fps.

There are some displays that can do multiples of 24fps - like some Pioneers can do 72Hz refresh, so each frame is just shown 3 times.

 

When I had the Sony DHG unit for a few months, this was the same situation (I have Mediacom). Which, in my case, was very helpful, since, to receive all my local HD channels OTA, I had to re-orient my outside antenna. With the Sony, I got all the local HDs in the clear. All but the CBS affil in my market come from one location. But the CBS tower, while only being about 8 miles away, has some very tall trees between it and my antenna making reception tricky (multipath) without fiddling with my rotor. If the S3 enables me to pull my local HDs through cable, I'll be a happy camper.

 

I have Brighthouse in Indiana and they give the locals in HD for free. And I'm pretty sure that Brighthouse gives even less things away than Comcast. And if your TV is has a HD tuner you probably don't even need a cable box for it. Might want to check into that.

 

Best Buy now has the Directv HDTV HR20 DVR posted on their website to be available 9/13 through 9/18. It's not TiVo.

 

The average consumer does not care. When you can get 1080p over the air or from cable then they will care. Reason? They will have something tangible to comapre it to. They go into store san see TV's, HD-DVD and Bluerays players, and they go home to their 480p VCR and they are happy. Unless you plan on going door to door with your 50" and Blueray player (perhaps in a van ), adaptaion of HD or Blueray is 5 to 7 years away.

 

Yeah 3:2 is not new (did I say it was? sorry), I deal with it every day as an editor. I think what we can take from my post and your post is that this HD business is very messy. I think the chances of a regular consumer getting it wrong are greater than getting it right. So Blu-Ray can do 1080p/60 but most of the displays already in peoples homes don't have an HDMI port that will pass it (display makers only this year started building in the ability to handle 1080p/60). Assuming they even have an HDMi port. We have 1080p/24 as the most common format on a Blu Ray, but almost no displays can handle it. Even if your display can handle 24fps, it proabably won't look all that great due to flicker at that slow rate so it has to be multiplied up to 48 or 72. More processing. Eventually my head will explode dealing with all this.

Back to the topic sort of, I worry that people spending $800 on the S3 might return it when they get it home and it doesn't look all that great because their display isn't well matched to it's output. Maybe this is why Tivo has targeted high end/geek buyers: they stand a better chance of being willing and able to figure it all out and end up as a satisfied customer.

 

I agree with most of what you write - but I never argued against it in the first place.

But I disagree with the last sentence - the consumer's choice is far from obvious.

 

The only reason I anticipate returning my S3 is if my cable company stopped supporting CableCARD (and I don't think that will be a problem here in Houston for reasons I expounded on in another forum). Short of that, I can't imagine me or anyone else sending a TiVo box back and returning to cable company SA 8300 HD DVR hell!! Surely people will figure out how to appropriately configure their display.

 

Well, the S3 can output content natively - so whatever it came in as: 480i/480p/720p/1080i. Or you can set it to convert all output to 480i, 480p, 720p, or 1080i. And with HDMI, component, S-Video, and composite output, hopefully ONE of those combos will work well for any given display.

If your TV (or receiver) has a good scaler, then Native is probably the best option. If you have a display that can only accept specific HD resolution input, then have the S3 scale it.

 

It's definately a sexy unit, but seeing as how I don't have a HD monitor yet I think I'll hold off. lol

 

You'd think so, right? Of course, maybe we're over-estimating people here. When I decided to switch to HD from SD, I decided to have TWC come out and 'install' HD cable in my living room rather than figuring out which ports were/weren't active on the back of the HD DVR box, then driving onto the mainland for Firewire or HDMI cable, DVI adapters, guessing at how long they needed to be, paying for them...yada yada yada. What a laugh that bright idea turned out to be. The guy showed up with rca component cables in hand. I said, "You're not going to use those for my HD install are you?" He said, "yeah, what else would I use?" I said, "HDMI, Firewire...something better than component." He said, "Why?" I said, "Because if you're not using a cable that transmits an HDCP signal, then you're not sending a purely digital uncompressed signal to my TV." It was clear from the look on his face that he had NO CLUE what I was talking about. I looked frustrated, I'm sure, and I told him to leave the box and go on his way. Of course the last laugh was on me for three reasons:
1) I had to do all the driving around and cord buying that I'd tried to dodge in the first place
2) After I get everything set up with an HDMI-DVI cable, rebundle the cords, etc., I've got this LOVELY 1080i picture; the only hang-up is it's got 2"x2" pixels and sound drop-outs on about half my HD channels because of how much TWC over-compresses the signal (which means that I probably wouldn't have lost all that much using those component cables after all...but I dare not complain about this because we all know how TWC thinks this problem should be solved: SDV).
3) That's DEFINITELY gonna be the guy who has to come out and activate my CableCARDs. Don't ya think?