I was in London's Brent Cross shopping centre in Dixons and John Lewis
playing the HD panel spotting game. Interested to see how these
retailers are demoing these panels without satellite signals, and
spotted some interesting hardware 'behind the scenes'. Take a look
closely next time you visit one of these shops.

Dixons - a Shuttle multimedia PC branded "LG - not for sale".

John Lewis - an optical drive (HD-DVD or Blueray) obviously sourced from
the far east (japanese labelled controls). Wonder if someone can give
more details what it is?

--
Adrian C

i believe it's h264 (mpeg4) material, stored on hard disk, specially
for plasma screen demos.

Everyones' getting excited about the Sky and BBC HDTV announcements,
but the actual transmission standard hasn't yet been announced!

Note that European 1050 line HDTV has been available via satellite for
several years (for anyone willing to pay!).

Adrian C wrote:

John Lewis - an optical drive (HD-DVD or Blueray) obviously sourced from
the far east (japanese labelled controls). Wonder if someone can give
more details what it is?

At the John Lewis in Liverpool they had a PC with the Windows Media
Player HDTV demos hooked up to a plasma (you could tell because of the
WMV logo on the screen). Dunno how it was connected, DVI I imagine.

In another part of the store they had a box covered with mostly Japanese
writing and the words CATV written on... some device create a HDTV DVB-C
signal?

The same John Lewis had News 24 (freeview I presume) on a large plasma
and it looked truly hideous with the MPEG artifacts blown up to massive
proportions. I dread to think what it would have looked like with
something fast moving, say sport.

It's nice to see retailers finally getting a clue about how to demo
equipment, that said there is still a long way to go. Shame that all the
non HDTV stuff still tends to be fed by low quality digital-source
broadcasts usually distributed using RF. I've only ever seen LCD TVs
looking terrible, though I don't know if this is entirely down to RF.
They've mostly lost me as a potential LCD TV customer though.

I watched a demo in Keighley of all places. Pennine Television had a 50 inch
Pioneer plasma hooked up to a satellite broadcast of an HD demo loop showing
all kinds of stuff. Highly impressive it was too.

Androo