I wrote previously about the strange case of potential customers wanting to buy Panasonic’s 3D professional camcorder even before the company had finalized its optical system.  Panasonic brought the AG-3DA1 to last month’s HPA Tech Retreat (along with a professional 3D monitor and a 3D demo truck).  Mike Bergeron also provided a presentation about the [...]

The first iPad has yet to be sold, but Broadcast Pix has already announced iPixPanel, an application that allows an iPad to control Slate production switchers.  There’s more here: http://www.broadcastpix.com/Press-Releases/-New-iPixPanel-Turns-Apple-iPad-into-Control-Panel-for-Broadcast-Pix-Systems.html

It’s hard to report on the HPA Tech Retreat.  There were almost 100 presentations in the main program, not counting more than 60 breakfast roundtables, four demo rooms (and a truck), and networking lunches, dinners, and strange-rules softball games for the more than 450 registered participants.  Still, it’s worth the effort, if only to recall [...]

TV Technology reported today that “Blu-ray’s share of the video-disc market shrunk to its lowest level in recent months, pulling in only about 8 percent compared to standard DVD movie and TV titles, for the third week of February.”
There’s more here: http://tvtechnology.com/article/95636
So my question is:  If consumers aren’t even buying ordinary today’s Blu-ray titles, which [...]

In my post “This Thing Called 3D” I asked why all TV sets shouldn’t be considered 3D TVs: http://schubincafe.com/blog/2010/01/this-thing-called-3d/
There was no specific definition of a 3DTV, and all TVs can display some forms of 3D.  Well, now there’s a definition, and, as a result, the Consumer Electronics Association has revised its projection of the number [...]

In the 3D-in-the-Home “supersession” at next week’s HPA Tech Retreat, one presentation is titled “Are You Nuts?”  I thought of that at today’s Panasonic pre-NAB press conference.
Let me emphasize from the outset that I was not thinking about Panasonic in the “nuts” category.  As best I could tell, no one from the company lied, which is [...]

Cinematographer Sean Fairburn, “after 6 years talking about it,” has “spent 3 Days with DSCLabs.com designing a Complete 3D Alignment chart for use with Side by Side and Beamsplitter Rigs. This Chart has built in many features I always need during Prep and testing and in the Field shot for shot. It is also intended [...]

Aldo Cugnini reported yesterday in Display Daily that HDMI Licensing released the 3D portion of HDMI Specification 1.4: http://displaydaily.com/2010/02/08/hdmi-licensing-group-releases-3d-hdmi-spec-to-public/
It’s available for download here: http://www.hdmi.org/manufacturer/specification.aspx
So is this “the” consumer 3D standard?  Perhaps not — at least not with a definite article.
According to Cugnini, “It is format-agnostic, providing support for seven video-format configurations called ‘3D structures,’ and [...]

Looking at a 3D monitor, you’ll probably need to be wearing 3D glasses.  But looking down at your switcher controls, intercom, or notes, you’d probably rather not.
That’s why All-Mobile Video engineer-in-charge Richie Wirth, Jr. came up with 3D “bifocals” (actually, half glasses).  They work perfectly.

The Longmont (Colorado) Times reported yesterday that holographic-storage technology company InPhase has apparently shut down: http://www.timescall.com/news_story.asp?ID=20627

There have been many additions to the program of the HPA Tech Retreat, which starts on February 16, from Alien Planet director Pierre de Lespinois to Rubber Duck Media Lab president Paul Childers to NBC Universal vp of technology policy Greg DePriest.  There are too many to list here, so check the online program at [...]

A 14-inch 4:3 TV with a picture tube, rabbit ears, volume & channel knobs, and black-&-white pictures — a throwback to 1952?  Actually, it’s LG’s very latest offering, the Serie 1 Retro Classic.
The pictures can be made to be color — or sepia, by the way.
Read more here:
http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/01/25/the-lg-serie-1-retro-classic-tv-is-the-definition-of-retrosexy/

I don’t know of anyone who has seen a field-emission-type display who hasn’t loved it and wanted to use it as a professional reference monitor.  They have exactly the same rise- and fall-times, color, and gray scale of CRT monitors because they use CRT phosphors, excited by electron emissions.  They have the edge-to-edge sharpness of [...]

SMPTE’s Professional Development Academy will be conducting a webinar on media technology & opera on February 11.  Why?
“Stereo sound and electronic home entertainment are two technologies invented for opera. Arguably, broadcasting, location recording, movies, and possibly even the telephone owe their existence to opera.
“Today, opera productions can involve banks of computer-graphics processors, infra-red motion-capture sensors, [...]

The Radiocommunication Sector of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU-R), perhaps best known for its global digital video standard, Rec. 601, today released a report offering a three-phase “roadmap for future 3D TV implementation….”
The first generation, what many already call 3D TV, is called “plano-stereoscopic television” by the report.  It’s not full 3D because “viewers will [...]

It isn’t often that we get hundredth anniversaries in media technology, so I figured this one — a double-header, actually — is worth mentioning.  Today is the anniversary of the first live broadcast of a complete opera; yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the first live opera broadcast.
If that’s enough for you, stop reading, and [...]

One of the reviews of 3D at the Consumer Electronics Show, by Scott Greczkowski in Multichannel News <http://www.multichannel.com/blog/The_Satellite_Dish/29923-It_s_a_3D_World.php>, contained these sentences:
“To me 3D is missing the eye popping color, everything is a color of gray or blue. Bright vibrant colors such as red, yellow and green are too dampened all because your wearing what are [...]

Today’s UK Telegraph has a story headlined: “Do 3D films make you sick? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/6952352/Do-3D-films-make-you-sick.html
It’s not a piece suggesting that 3D makes everyone sick, but it points out that some individuals, perhaps with visual problems, can’t stand 3D even in movie theaters. That’s a problem worth noting.  Shutting one eye won’t help; the other will still see [...]

There have been many news stories lately about Sony expecting that 30 to 50 percent of the TVs it sells in the fiscal year starting April 2012 will be 3-D capable.  Some people seem amazed that the proportion is so high; they could as easily be amazed it’s so low.
It’s common to see supermarket labels [...]

Registration just opened for the 16th-annual Tech Retreat, an epic event of the Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA).  It will take place February 16-19 at Rancho Las Palmas Resort & Spa, Rancho Mirage, California.
Despite HPA’s name, the retreat is neither in nor (exclusively) about Hollywood (though top-ranking executives of the major studios will be there) and [...]

It’s possible that you’ve never heard of AUO; it’s unlikely you’ve never seen their products.  They’re one of the world’s largest makers of LCD displays, ranging from 1.2-inch to more than 65-inch.  And now they’ve announced a “full-HD” resolution 14-inch OLED display.
It would be nice to be able to replace picture-tube-based reference monitors with something [...]

Doug Lung’s RF Report today discusses an FCC report on the testing of 136 digital-television converter boxes, presented at the IEEE Broadcast Symposium. Twelve boxes failed to work, 30% couldn’t get Daylight Savings Time right, both single-conversion and dual-conversion tuners had interference issues, “some of the boxes had problems with output video quality, and at [...]

Many people have requested the PowerPoint slides from my presentations on Lip-Sync to the Audio Engineering Society, the International Broadcasting Convention to the first Schubin Cafe, and Acquisition Issues to HD World.  They may be found in the “Get the Download” section of this site.

I was contacted recently by someone who couldn’t figure out why a TV-band wireless mic was taking hits.  I looked up the frequency and found it to be almost exactly on the picture-carrier frequency of an analog TV channel.  But didn’t over-the-air analog TV broadcasting go away in the U.S. earlier this year?  No.  Only [...]

This is probably worth watching:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TlCGh5Pc90

Not everything that can be demonstrated can be turned into a product.  And not every idea for a product should be turned into a product.  Still, everything we use today had an origin, and famous thinkers once declared such developments as the telephone, television, computer, and photocopier near useless or worse.
Thus it was that I [...]

In 2008, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for work related to broken symmetry in subatomic physics.  In 2007, it was for giant magnetoresistance, in 2006, blackbody form and anisotropy of cosmic microwave background radiation, and so on back to the first, in 1901, for what were then called Roentgen rays.  But today is [...]

Sony is reportedly going to unveil a 240-frame-per-second, single-lens 3-D camera at CEATEC in Japan next week.  It’s not the first time single-lens 3-D has been shown, and it’s not necessarily ideal (what’s gained in eliminating dual-lens differences is lost in interpupilary distance), but it’s still interesting that Sony will be introducing a 240-fps camera.

It’s nice to be reminded, every now & then, that we are not the great technological geniuses we think we are.  A good place to do that is at the Drottningholms Slottsteater, an opera house in the Stockholm area that opened in 1766.  It’s a long story to explain why, but suffice it to say [...]

For a long time, I’ve been familiar with the illustrations of the French artist and writer Albert Robida because of his “predictions” of television as early as 1882.  But, until recently, I had not read his accompanying descriptions.  An English translation of Robida’s 1882 book The Twentieth Century was published by Wesleyan University Press in [...]