Contemporary DTV Acquisition—Some Perspectives on the Related Standards, the Technologies, and the Creative

Abstract

The arrival of digital television (DTV) has created a curious maelstrom of tentative engineering excitement, business anxiety, creative skepticism, and spotty consumer anticipation. In light of the imminent debut of new DTV services, lingering technical debates on DTV formats are no longer helpful, and, in the larger scheme of things, they are already anachronistic. In the context of the front end of the new television system, DTV image acquisition, technical debate certainly still swirls unchecked. This paper will attempt some perspectives intended to urge a move to the next and most important phase of this inter-industry DTV movement, namely, proactive implementation by the creative program production community. The present technical status of DTV image acquisition will prove to be better than many believe. It is suggested that the rigorous implementation of Standards should be subservient to the paced and incremental march of Technology, and that it is the Creative community that best drives the pace of advance of the latter. At some point, it becomes essential for the realities and subjectivity of digital program creation to supplant misguided engineering rigor. Resolution will be central to much that is examined here. There is surely no technical performance parameter that is so carelessly bandied, and so grossly misunderstood, particularly when it comes to the realities of widescreen standard-definition television (SDTV) and high-definition television (HDTV) picture acquisition.