My son wanted a 4K "Smart" TV to replace his old TV, the "old TV" being a Samsung 50" plasma I bought new in 2007. Nothing wrong with the Samsung except its huge and acts as a radiator which heats his room up. Its not missed a beat in 13 years (I suspect I've now jinxed that). I've now moved the Samsung to my bedroom to replace an equally "old" Panasonic 32" LCD bought the same time in 2007, again that's not missed a beat either.
I bought the lad a JVC 4K smart TV, light as a feather, thin as a slip of paper, easy to handle and does not pump out any heat, result you might add. Well, yes in a way, I can't grumble at the picture as its superb, lots of connectivity and of course all the "smart" bells and whistles and the 4K capability.
What I find ironic is this. We as a community are used to the warm up time of valve TV's you know the score, switch on, put the kettle on, wait and eventually you get your picture. Then transistors came along and pretty much instant sound and picture, no time to make a brew, some would call that progress. Well we're back to those valve-warm-up days with "smart" TV's. Power on the JVC and hey presto and instant JVC logo appears on screen, good so far? No, wait and wait and wait... you get the picture (or maybe you don't) finally you get the TV interface on screen to select what you want, input sources or services etc.
I found myself muttering, will you just give me the flaming picture. OK, its essentially an O/S front end strapped to a TV, I know, but all the same it struck me ironic and even my son said, "It takes the same time as your old Bush TV22 to boot". Made me chuckle, the thought of a TV22 booting, Progress A?
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The problem with Smart TV sets seems to be that they don’t stay “Smart” for long. Even if the set is still working in 10 years time the likelihood is that Smart part would have been lost many years before.
To some progress.
I will keep the 15 year old Sony 32 inch in the living room until it expires, my hands on skill are now not good enough for PCB work. I will bring the 20 inch Tesco set from the bedroom, it never gets switched on for watching there, just gets switched on occasionally to confirm it still works.
Anyway I hope your son appreciates his present, it’s Father’s Day today, you should have been given presents. ?
Frank
I found myself muttering, will you just give me the flaming picture. OK, its essentially an O/S front end strapped to a TV, I know, but all the same it struck me ironic and even my son said, "It takes the same time as your old Bush TV22 to boot". Made me chuckle, the thought of a TV22 booting, Progress A?
This is a thought I often have when dealing with 'Smart' TVs - the big 4K Sony I bought secondhand is on the lengthy side but when I consider how little time that old CRT Panasonic takes to get going in the corner of my lounge, where it has sat for the last thirty-plus years... the professional Sony OLEDs I'm more familiar with take a little while too and I do jokingly refer to those as "warming up".
It does however raise a valid point about how "live" TV actually is now - I was discussing this with a mate who's involved in broadcast IP infrastructure and the delays involved in that mean it can be a quarter of a second or more to get to the screen even in the technical areas and by the time it gets to the viewer's home, even more. By contrast, in our analogue TV days the scene in front of the camera was in the viewer's home before even a few lines had passed.
The problem with Smart TV sets seems to be that they don’t stay “Smart” for long.
Yep, and then they buy another one, which is good news for some of us! ?
I've wondered for a long time on "how live is live". You can, for instance watch a programme via satellite, and terrestrial TV at the same time, except that there can be upwards of 4 seconds time difference, but not only that, whereas we might think that it's reasonable to assume that the the satellite route would take longer, given the 22'500 miles x2 to the satellite and back, but it takes the biscuit when it's the terrestrial path which is lagging 4 sec. behind!
Certain live shows also have a deliberate delay of some amount of seconds, this is to ensure that *bleeps* can be inserted over any naughty words etc.
They learnt their lesson well after the Bill Grundy incident with the Sex Pistols ? ?
The seven second delay has been used on radio phone-in shows for years.
I can remember TFI Friday had to have a delay as guests were a bit prone to mouth off, especially as the first screening was at teatime.
That's down to the amount of data compression applied to the signal. It's because the data is compressed that the delays stack up: some of the bit rates for HD terrestrial are quite slow indeed. If you've got stuff being compressed in the order of 400:1 then it takes a lot of time and clever hardware to reduce the native 1.5Gbit/second 50i HD video to something broadcastable inside current channel bandwidths.
More than that on some shows - I've heard cases of delays measured in minutes as a "just in case" measure.
The "seven second delay" is immortalised in a Donald Fagen song, Nightfly.
I found myself muttering, will you just give me the flaming picture. OK, its essentially an O/S front end strapped to a TV, I know, but all the same it struck me ironic and even my son said, "It takes the same time as your old Bush TV22 to boot". Made me chuckle, the thought of a TV22 booting, Progress A?
I thought that was quite funny too!
It's easy to forget that old valve tellies needed to warm up first. Then solid-state CRT TVs came along. The sound started straightaway and the picture appeared after a few seconds. A few CRT TVs kept the CRT heater alight during standby, for an instant-on.
Early LCD and plasma displays had a fast start. Ironically, 'smart' TVs take longer to start because of the extra software, but I think it's also due to energy-saving requirements. For example I have a Panasonic blu-ray disc player which takes 30-40 seconds to start, but it has a quick-start mode which, when enabled, allows it to come out of standby in 0.5 seconds. The penalty is that the standby power consumption goes up from 0.5w to 7 watts. Likewise, some digital TV boxes (Sky, Virgin, TalkTalk) take a long time to start initially, but because they're normally running all the time (with considerable power consumption even in standby), you don't notice.
Talking of power consumption, I reckon you'll save around 200 watts by replacing the plasma display with LED-LCD. That's 1 unit (or about 17p) saved every 5 hours. Assuming 5 hours use per day, that's about £60 per year of electricity savings. However, it's debateable whether you'll get your money back over the lifetime of the new TV. I expect it will take around 5 years to pay for itself, but sadly I see a lot of newish (only 3-4 years old) flatscreen TVs at the tip. They don't last like the old ones. I suppose that's progress too.
I rely on a hard drive PVR for my Freeview signal and it not only takes a very long time to boot up from cold but is noisy when in standby/quickstart mode. I plan to replace the hard drive with a solid state drive once ITB units become affordable. Hopefully that will both speed up boot times and reduce noise when in standby.
1TB Western Digital 'Blue' is about GBP110 at the moment - it's what's inside this laptop I'm writing on. However, it should be noted that AV drives respond to a subset of instructions other drives may not. I had a generic drive-in-a-box attached to my Humax STB and after about four failed recordings I got fed up, binned the drive and bought a 1TB WD MyBook AV-TV drive specifically for AV use. It's utterly silent in use and has never missed a recording since installation.
I don’t know if today’s AV drives are the same but very early ones would ignore single bit errors on the assumption that the vision artefact would be transient. The time that the ECC would take would be too long. Obviously a major problem if used as a data drive.
Early 1990 Seagate SCSI drives would re calibrate the heads every thirty minutes, going offline for a few milliseconds, no good again if recording real-time data. That was fun to find on a flight sim.
Frank
