Should Australia proceed with HDTV?

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Essay topic:         Should Australia proceed with HDTV?

Introduction

The introduction of HDTV to the Australian market has had many implications for the society and different sectors of the government as a whole. As this “phased” introduction to the Australian market is taking place at a rapid rate and new technology keeps on changing the technical aspects of this project, most of the information in this essay is a collation and analysis from web documents and websites, which change continually.   

HDTV is different from all other forms of TV broadcast in that it has features beyond the capability of normal TV. It’s higher resolution combined with Dolby Digital Surround sound gives the customer a sense of realism never before experienced through analogue TV. The advantages and disadvantages of HDTV would be discussed in this essay as well as certain comparisons would be made against the current standards to give the reader a quantifiable idea of the topics discussed. Additionally the technical aspects of this new technology would be discussed with the latest information available, which may change in due course due to the technological changes. The essay also aims to discuss the political implications of the issue and laws either being formulated or in the process of formulation in the senate.  

Advantages of HDTV in the Australian Market

Digital Television is a very recent technology that provides better picture and sound quality as well as improved reception compared to the current analogue TV. It has added features such as email and various other interactive services as well as the capability for programming. As part of the current plan HDTV programmes have been viewed using normal TV without the need to change any equipment. This points out the flexibility that HDTV allows in the trial phase. As an example below is an image viewed through a standard TV compared to its corresponding view in HDTV format. Due to its width to height ratio, HDTV provides a wider field of view, which can be picked up by the peripheral vision of the human eye thereby giving a sense to the viewer of actually being part of the scene. The pictures viewed through HDTV are much more detailed since the number of individual pixels used to represent a picture in HDTV is numerically superior than if the picture were viewed through standard TV format.  It has been reported that normal TV has an effective picture resolution of approximately 200,000 pixels as compared to the 2 million pixels in HDTV. In layman’s terms, HDTV has more information in terms of colour and object size to describe the same image than that when used in analogue TV.  

Currently, broadcasters are having to crop the entire picture to fit it into the current 4:3 ratio format and this means that some parts of the scenery is eliminated. Since HDTV uses 16:9(being 16 across and 9 high) the entire scene is represented as is and this provides a higher sense of realism. The reason that historically cinemas have produced the HDTV effect is that movies have been produced in this wide screen format since the 1950’s, but it has taken television manufacturers a little longer to implement this format. Additionally, also using the HDTV standards the broadcasters will be able to send data directly to the screen or be downloaded via a PC.

  HDTV has a superior sound quality in addition to the impeccable picture quality. HDTV broadcasts will be encoded with Dolby Digital audio, featuring six separate audio tracks. Each track can be sent to a different speaker, allowing detailed and realistic surround sound.

HDTV has been found to be less susceptible to interference from other electronic equipment, which generally cause havoc in places like Sydney where a lot of electronic interference is generated from house appliances such as air conditioners and pool filters.

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Idea of picture from

Gary Brown (2002 Dec), How HDTV Works, http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/hdtv.htm.

 HDTV will allow the broadcasters to transmit multiple channels and has an added feature of captions, which is still not available on most analogue TV services.

Among the features immediately available with HDTV it is easy to forget the yet unchartered territory of “Interactive Television”.  Basically it is an Internet like technology where the viewer has certain control over the content being broadcasted. Additionally the viewer gets real time feedback on the effects of the controls placed in his/her hands. This does however ...

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