New TVs Are Easy to Admire, Tougher to Comprehend
By Rob Pegoraro
LAS VEGAS
It is becoming harder to buy a television set than a personal computer. The unheralded side effect of the digital transformation that promises to bring TV sets new levels of quality and performance is that they've become much harder to decipher.
These things were once commodity items that anybody could buy based largely on brand and price, but the evidence on the show floor at the Consumer Electronics Show here indicates that they're all shifting painfully back into the status of "exclusive" products, each with a unique mix of innovations, limitations and, most of the time, higher prices.
This tension between creativity and commodity is part of this industry's way of life. A product can't be born without creativity, but it can't be a success until it hits commodity status. In between, it's a mess for consumers to sort out.
That's the story behind three big stories of this year's CES: flat-panel digital televisions, digital video recording and wireless media networks.
Consider the first, those lust-worthy LCD and plasma screens, at sizes as big as 80 inches (in the form of a Samsung prototype that occupied its own wall in the company's sprawling booth). Choosing between LCD and plasma may be easiest decision; you won't find plasma sets under 40 inches or so. Then brace yourself as you contemplate these and other features: ATSC tuner; CableCard compatibility; and DVI, HDMI or FireWire connectors.
In (more or less) English: Does the set include a digital tuner for over-the-air broadcasts, can you pop in a card issued by your cable company to tune in digital broadcasts without a cable box, and which of three different kinds of digital inputs does it include?
For my money, the optimal answers are yes, yes, HDMI and FireWire. (Fortunately, a more troubling "feature," the government-mandated copy-protection "broadcast flag" copy-protection scheme, seems unlikely to show up on many sets until next year.) The catch: A set meeting those requirements will still run you more than $3,000.
For relief from that kind of cost, new "microdisplay" technology may offer a cheaper way to a thinner set. On Thursday, Intel announced a major venture into developing chipsets for one kind of microdisplay, Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS), with a goal of making a 40-inch set possible for under $2,000 by next year.
In comparison, manufacturers I talked to didn't expect LCD sets to get past 30 inches for that price in that time frame, even with aggressive pricing from such new entrants as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Westinghouse and Daewoo.
(If $2,000 is still too pricey, there will be plenty of traditional cathode-ray-tube high-definition sets. But few vendors here bother to exhibit them or talk about them.)
Whatever TV technology you buy, you will face a bewildering array of options. Your next TV may include a built-in digital video recorder, WiFi wireless networking or, in the case of two sets by Epson (yes, the printer company), a built-in photo printer.
Recording the shows you watch on the digital television may constitute another headache. The industry, not having settled a three-way format war in recordable DVDs, has already moved on to a two-way format war in high-definition recordable DVDs.
Most manufacturers, including the likes of Sony, Panasonic, Philips and Samsung, back a format called Blu-ray, but the "official" standards-setting organization, the DVD Forum, has anointed an incompatible technology, HD-DVD. This is the industry at its squabbling, feudalistic best.
"The products are in some cases inherently complex, but in other cases unnecessarily complex," Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos said at a luncheon Friday. He cited a WiFi router whose convoluted setup "reduced grown computer scientists to tears" -- and caused a quarter of these devices to be returned.
The biggest surprise at this show was how many manufacturers are working on wireless systems to share a computer's collections of music, photos and often videos with a home theater. But while these devices might make life a lot easier they also might make our stereos act like that WiFi router.
Microsoft unveiled a number of initiatives to help users get their photos and songs off the computer. It's developing software to smooth media sharing in Windows and in the special Media Center edition of the operating system, and it's revising the copy controls in its Windows Media file format to allow buyers on songs on such sites as Napster (news - web sites) to broadcast their purchases to other machines in a home network.
Microsoft also is working on software to run a family of paperback-sized "Portable Media Centers" that would store copies of the entertainment collected on Media Center PCs for viewing outside the house. It has plenty of company in that effort. For example, Sony has its own proposed home media network, complete with a "LocationFree" tablet display to allow Web browsing from the couch. (Several manufacturers are working on a less ambitious but more immediately useful kind of networking -- wireless surround-sound systems that don't require you to snake wires across the living room to reach the rear speakers.)
The bright spot in all this confusion is that it leaves room for creativity -- the best LCD or DVD recorder may wind up coming from some firm in Taiwan or China nobody's heard of. And all the while, prices continue to drop. It takes a while, but sooner or later just about anything you can see on the show floor here winds up in the likes of Target and Wal-Mart at prices that normal human beings can stomach.
Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com.
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