BUT IF IT'S SO BIG, HOW DO I SNEAK IT PAST THE WIFE?

PluggedIn: New TVs play sharper-than-ever pictures (Lucas van Grinsven, Reuters, 5/20/03).

Consumers want bigger televisions. But TV makers cannot just "scale up" screens because it would be like blowing up a cheap digital photo: the picture just blurs.

Instead, electronics makers have grasped the black art of writing software and loading it into cheap but powerful semiconductors that can invent picture details on the fly.

"The latest TVs display eight times more detail than available in the original broadcast," says Michiel Klompenhouwer, a research scientist in video processing and visual perception at Philips (AMS:PHG), Europe's largest TV maker and the world's largest glass display maker in two joint ventures with South Korea's LG. . . .

A series of innovations since the mid-1990s has doubled the number of horizontal lines displayed on a TV screen while the number of tiny pixels on each line has also doubled.

TV makers have also added software to again double the number of images during a movie broadcast, shot in 24 frames a second, while adding software that predicts how objects move.

Even on bigger screens these innovations provide much more detail while ridding the TV set of irritating flicker.

"That kind of improvement you can get when you use sophisticated software in digital devices. We've moved from curved analog TVs to flat digital TVs," says Barry Young, an analyst at research firm DisplaySearch in Austin, Texas.

Add sensors that check if you're watching TV in broad daylight and three-dimensional sound, and it becomes clear why consumer electronics makers are hopeful about their TV business despite the 10 percent annual price erosion in basic TV tubes. . . .

Sales of tube TVs with so-called "real flat" displays, which often feature the picture-improving gizmos, are seen doubling to 60 million units over the next three years. . . .

Some of the most recent TV improvements are being led by the new players. Sharp has just launched the first TV with a three-dimensional (3-D) picture in Japan. Others are racing to develop what is considered to be the Holy Grail of TV viewing. . . .

Other improvements come from small upstart companies like British-based NXT, which has invented a transparent vibrating film that functions as a loudspeaker and is spanned over a display. Japan's NEC has just launched the first two commercial PC monitors using this technology, with sound coming straight out of the picture, rather than from the sides.

On some crackpot theory that this makes us better parents, we don't even have cable. Our tv viewing is restricted to the three major networks (which come in with varying amounts of static, depending upon the weather) and PBS, which comes in clear. Occasionally, we manage to hear a Fox program, and can sort of make out what's happening. Whenever we're at someone else's house watching their tv, we're constantly saying "So that's what he [or she] looks like." Last month we were at Circuit City, and saw a 42" flat screen plasma tv. Wow. A golf tournament was playing and it freaked us out. We really don't want to see those people that clearly. But, all the same, Wow. Sometimes all we can do is admit that we're Fallen, and revel in it. Posted by David Cohen at May 20, 2003 3:18 PM