Quote:
Originally Posted by davidhorman
Digital video is perfectly capable of transmitting 60 temporal events per second without resorting to interlacing, which is only clinging to existence thanks to a self-perpetuating loop of legacy support.
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Yes, digital video can handle 60 temporal events per second. We have 60p, so that is not in dispute.
What IS in dispute is whether either broadcast TV or DBS (e.g., DirecTV), within the spectrum they are allocated, have the bandwidth to do that
and still offer the same number of channels. I think we could all make the argument that 80% of the channels could be eliminated, but there are strong business reasons that push broadcasters in the other direction. So, even today, 1080i is being used in order to provide a "temporally pleasing" experience, without consuming too much bandwidth.
One other point that is obvious, but bears repeating, is that our current North American HD standard was finalized in 1993. That was the same year that the Intel Pentium processor was introduced, but almost all sales that year were 486 computers.
Think of the truly unbelievable increase in computing power in that time.
As this chart shows:
Instructions Per Second
the processing power these engineers had to work with was around 25 MIPS at 66 MHz.. In actuality, it was considerably less than that because consumer electronics have to sell for a low price, and the "horsepower" shown in these charts was out of that price range.
In 1996, the year before the DVD (an SD device) was introduced, the Pentium Pro got us to 541 MIPS at 200 MHz.
By the time the first consumer HD players arrived in stores (2004) Intel architecture chips were around 10,000 MIPS at 3 GHz.
Today, Intel i7 chips at over 100,000 MIPS at over 3 GHz.
The point is that many things that we can easily do today, were not even conceivable when these standards were developed.
So, "change the standards!!" you say.
Unfortunately, standards cannot be changed quickly. The best example of that is the changeover from SD to HD. In this country, that happened exactly seven years ago this month. Despite that time, and despite a mandate from Congress, we still have a sizeable number of channels broadcasting in SD (about 100 on my system).