Clueless HDTV Owners

How is this for scary? Almost 1 in 5 HDTV owners can’t tell the difference between HD and standard definition TV!

According to a recent study by Leichtman Research Group, 18% of HDTV owners were watching standard definition programming when they thought they were watching HD programming. In June of this year, only 45 per cent of HDTV owners knew what Blu-ray was according to a survey by the NPD Group.

I see a lot of people watching stretched standard definition programming on their widescreen HD sets all of the time. To make matters worse I’m guessing that a lot of people aren’t setting up their Blu-ray players properly, myself included.

I was so excited and in such a rush to use my new Blu-ray player this past weekend that I watched half of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull before I realized that I was watching everything in 480i instead of 1080p.

At 480 lines interlaced, things look better than my old DVD player. At 1080 lines progressive, the video looks outstanding!

The default settings on my Sony BDP-S350 Blu-ray player set all video content to widescreen. I was watching Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936) last night had to muck about the settings to display the movie in its proper aspect ratio of 1.33 : 1. The default settings on the player don’t detect the aspect ratios of video content and will try to display everything in a 16 : 9 ratio that stretches everything.

Posted in Technology at 10:13 PM