CES 2009 - TV Trends, WirelessHD, 240Hz and Netbook Pricing
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Manveer Wasson on January 12, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Ridiculous Netbook Pricing
Thanks for listening to me talk about TVs for a while, now let’s move on to more PC-topics. In particular, I’d like to address the ridiculous nature of netbook pricing.
I had the pleasure of dining with Intel’s Mooly Eden at CES. You may remember Mooly as the father of Centrino; he headed up the Banias design team, which was responsible for the very first Centrino CPU. These days Mooly is more marketing than engineering, but he hasn’t lost his ability to be frank.
I talked to Mooly about how the Atom processor wasn’t delivering enough performance for the netbooks that it’s in. I asked him what happens once Moorestown comes around; will Atom continue to be the netbook CPU of choice or will Intel introduce a very scaled down Nehalem for netbooks and use Atom in smartphones and other smaller devices?
To my surprise, Mooly said that the Atom delivered fine performance for netbooks. But it turned out that Mooly and I had very differing views on netbooks. Mooly’s view was that netbooks should be ultra affordable devices priced between $299 and $349. At those prices, Atom does deliver enough performance.
The reality of the situation however, is that manufacturers are shipping netbooks in the $500 - $900 range (way to go Sony) and outfitting them with 1.6GHz and even 1.33GHz Atom processors. I get that you’re paying a premium for the size of the device, but it seems to me that manufacturers are capitalizing on the newness of netbooks by attempting to price them much higher than they should be.
Stylish, it'll fit in your purse, but it's still got a CPU slower than what was in a mainstream notebook from 2004.
While Dell and HP should be commended on entering the market at or near that $299 - $349 range, I’d like to see more of that sort of behavior from their peers in the market. I think it’s very telling that Apple has opted out of building an Atom-based system thus far; the only reason it makes sense is if you price it very low, and that’s not something Apple would do. The alternative would be putting an Atom in a higher priced notebook, which would compromise the experience, something Apple is also not too keen on doing.
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Jaybus - Tuesday, January 13, 2009 - link
I doubt they chose the 60 GHz band just to avoid copyright problems. It is because of the bandwidth that they needed. 250 Mbps is not nearly enough. HDMI 1.0 specifies 4.9 Gbps for uncompressed transmission of 1080p60Hz plus 8-chan audio. HDMI 1.3 upped it to 10.3 Gbps to allow for higher resolutions. WirelessHD has a 7 GHz bandwidth on a 60 GHz carrier to achieve a max of around 25 Gbps. You obviously can't have a 7 GHz bandwidth with only a 5 GHz carrier frequency, so the carrier frequency had to be high to truly do HDMI wirelessly. Now why they chose 60 GHz as opposed to say 40 GHz may be because of transmission distance.Galvin - Monday, January 12, 2009 - link
4K LCD's scare me that just increases your chance of dead pixels by 2x. The sooner FED/SED tech is out the better. Cause that tech doesn't need all the fancy back lighting of LCD to handle blacks/whites.Plifzig - Monday, January 12, 2009 - link
Even worse, it increases your chances of getting dead pixels by 2X in the horizontal AND 2X in the vertical. Overall it's a 4X chance increase!2,073,600 pixels vs. 8,294,400 pixels
Denithor - Monday, January 12, 2009 - link
And can you imagine the GPU required to push a game for that resolution?SlyNine - Tuesday, January 13, 2009 - link
Geforce 256 SDR ?? ;)3DoubleD - Monday, January 12, 2009 - link
"Another potential benefit of full matrix LED backlighting is what Toshiba and some other manufacturers are calling the 240Hz effect. Last year we saw the beginnings of a move to 120Hz LCDs, which you may remember isn’t LCD panels with 120Hz refresh rates. There are only 60 frames of data displayed, the data in between two frames is simply interpolated on the fly effectively giving you 120 frames per second (but from only 60 frames worth of data)."Anand, this is one implementation of 120 Hz technology, but I fear it is the incorrect one. Many (if not all) TV manufacturers are producing TVs that use interpolation on 120 Hz TVs. This feature primarily targets sports as many complain about blurring while watching their favorite fast paced games on their several thousand dollar LCD TVs. This is the only time interpolation should be implemented as the effect is rather sickening for movie content. Interpolation of movie frames gives a rather "home video, handycam" sort of feel, completely ruining the experience.
120 Hz was used to allow both movie and tv content to be viewed without performing an uneven pulldown. On most TVs in the past, 24 Hz content (from Blu-rays, HD DVDs, and properly encoded movies and TV shows on the internet) required a 2:3 pulldown to be shown at 30 Hz and then doubled to the 60 Hz refresh rate of your TV to eliminate flickering. Unfortunately, the 2:3 pulldown isn't perfect and you get a phenomena called telcine judder or motion interpolation. This is very obvious during slow panning scenes, where the panning motion does not seem smooth, but jumps. The only way to properly handle 24 Hz material is to display it at a refresh rate at an even multiple of 24. Thus there are two options: offer two possible refresh rates on your TV (60 Hz and a multiple of 24 but greater than 60 (72 Hz or 96 Hz)), OR offer one refresh rate at 120 Hz as it is divisible by both 24 and 30 Hz.
TVs such as the Pioneer Kuro line offer the first implementation, where 60 and 72 Hz refresh rates are available. Most LCDs above ~$1500 CAD offer 120 Hz. With most of these 120 Hz LCDs, interpolation can be turned off for proper movie viewing. With all of this said, a TV that has a 240 Hz refresh rate is completely useless as 120 Hz solves the problem of displaying both 24 and 30 Hz content as well as offering interpolation for keen eyed sports fans.
However, the general public will never understand this... so let the Mhz wars begin (again)
Holly - Sunday, January 18, 2009 - link
You forget one thing... These 240Hz screens might be also inteded as a first step to shutter-glass aided 3D screen simulation. Giving each eye 120Hz is about reasonable refresh rate not to tire the eyes too much.strikeback03 - Monday, January 12, 2009 - link
If you turn off interpolation, wouldn't that leave 60Hz as the only option? Which would still not provide a multiple of 24 for movies.3DoubleD - Monday, January 12, 2009 - link
When you turn interpolation off it should due a 5:5 pulldown, which is simply playing the same frame 5 time in a row. However, some TVs don't do this and they should be avoided. This is something everyone should look for when shopping for a TV. Most TVs with 120 Hz capabilities have off-low-medium-high settings for their interpolation3DoubleD - Monday, January 12, 2009 - link
and by "due" I mean "do"... time for the afternoon coffee