Holiday Buying Guide

Holiday Buying Guide


HDTV’s

HDTV’s have a frustrating amount of jargon and terms associated with them. Here is a brief breakdown of what it all means.

Interlaced vs Progressive:

Interlaced (referred to as i) – The traditional way of sending a picture. The picture is made of horizontal lines. All the odd lines are displayed, followed by all even. This works well, but can cause edges of objects in motion to appear jagged.
Progress (referred to as p) – All horizontal lines are displayed at once. Picture is much sharper even if objects are in motion.

Signal Type:

480i (fair) – The traditional picture signal from older devices.
480p (good) – Referred to as Enhanced Definition. This is the quality of video stored on DVDs.
720p (very good) – This the lowest level of HD. This quality is generally good enough for TV’s up to 40 inches.
1080i (very good) – A higher form of HD, typically found on HD television channels.
1080p (best) – The highest form of HD and also referred to as Full HD. This format is generally only found with things like Blu-Ray players, Video games and some setup boxes. 1080p is not generally available through cable (expect with Video on Demand) or antenna.

Refresh rate (Hz):

2 hz is equal to one frame. And TVs commonly show 30 frames per Second. In the case of Interlaced pictures, each hz is equal to half a frame.

60 hz – Television standard, 30 frames a second.
120 hz – Every other frame is invented by the TV. The television looks at 2 frames, and invents one in between them. This compares to 60 frames a second.
240 hz – 3 out of four frames is invented by the TV. The televisions looks at 2 frames and invents a series of 3 in between. This compares to 120 frames a second.

HD Sources:

In order to get an HD picture you’ll need 3 things. A HDTV, a HD source and a HD cable to connect the two (with the exception of over the air TV).
Many of your existing devices (video games, DVDs, other boxes) are capable of higher quality pictures then they might be currently displaying. If your devices comes with composite cables (RCA or yellow, red and white cables) check to see if it will take another cable. For your HDTV either a HDMI or a component (Green, Blue, Red plus Red and White cables) are suitable. 480p has been available since the late 90’s so many older devices may support this. All you will need is a set of Component cables ($20 approx). You many need to change the output of your device to 480p (see manual for directions).

Don’t forget the cables.

To get an HD picture, you’ll need an HD cable (either component or HDMI) attaching your device to your HDTV. You see no difference in picture quality between a DVD and Blu-ray unless you have your Blu-ray player hooked up properly.

Plasma vs LCD vs DLP

Plasma is generally considered to be the very best quality HDTV. Plasma has the best looking blacks, and considered the best for home theatre.
LCD performs best in well lit rooms. This gives it a significant advantage over Plasma in show rooms.
DLP Tv’s use millions of tiny mirrors to create a picture. They are generally cheaper then LCD TV’s and are considered to have a better picture. On the downside they have bulbs that need replacing.

MP3 Players

Apple makes several models of iPods. The one with the most features is the iPod Touch which plays music, movies, games, runs apps and surfs the net. The iPod Touch cost $190 for 8GB, $300 for 32GB, and $400 for 64 GB. The iPod Nano is the smallest iPod available (that has a screen), and roughly the dimensions of a credit card. Unlike the iPod Touch the Nano has a built in FM tuner (allowing you to pause live radio) and a built in video camera. You can even tag songs you like on the radio, and download them from iTunes (when attached to a computer). The iPod Nano cost $140 for the 8GB model, and $170 for the 16GB model. The iPod Classic will give you the most Gigs for your buck. The iPod classic is strictly a music and video player but 160GB costs just $235.

Of course Apple isn’t the only supplier of MP3 players,

Clarification:

The prices listed here, are approximate and based on the lowest prices we could find at press time. The capacity of MP3 players is an estimate and to be used as an approximation only.



The values shown are based upon the file sizes, in reality, file are differing sizes, and your MP3 Player may hold more or less depending on the actual stored contents. All sizes and counts are approximations for comparison only. Song files are estimated at 5 & 10 Megabytes, Photos at 5 & 10 Megapixels (5MP = 1.5MB, 10MP = 3MB), Videos at 10 Megabytes.

Harnessing the Wisdom of the crowd

How We Benefit
The old saying 'many hands make light work' is especially true in the digital age. The crowd refers to any group of people, be them a physical crowd at a county fair, or a group of people separated by thousands of miles on the internet. In this weeks article we will explore who is using the crowd and why it benefits us all

A Little History
When Google came up with its ranking system based on links, in 1996 it was major step forward in search. Instead of just indexing the web, Google was able to find the relevance of websites based on the number of links back to it.

The basic concept; the more people link to this page, the more value it has. This was an early attempt to harness the wisdom the crowd.

Years earlier, Yahoo! attempted to index the web by hand. While the World Wide Web was still fledgling, it was possible for two people to manually list websites and categorize them.

Years later, that idea would be simply impossible and indexing the web would need to be done through automated Web crawlers or "Spiders".

However, while a Spider can read a web page, it's hard for it to know the value of the information. So Google "crowd sourced" it. While a few people couldn’t manually read every website and assess its value, a few million could.

By counting the number of links back to a site, Google could tell value of the content. Every time a blogger or webmaster links to another site, he or she lends creditability to the site.

Social Networking
Recently crowd sourcing has become far more common. Digg.com and Stumpleupon.com allow people to rate website and news stories. The front page of Digg is based upon what's been 'Dug' up by the community.

YouTube allows people to rate each video out of five stars, and even rate the comments on the site thumbs up or down. If a comment gets enough thumbs down, it's hidden from view.

Twitter works similarly. Each user has a list of followers, a list of people who they follow, and a list of lists they appear on.

You can judge someone's relevance by how many people follow them, and see what lists they appear on.If you find someone's input valuable, you can put them down on list of interesting people. Conversely if you find someone annoying, you can list as a "spammer".Even Facebook allows you to share sites and videos with your friends. Post the latest funny YouTube video on your wall, and you're friends will see it in their news feed.

But what does it all mean? It means two things. Firstly, that people (not computers) are best equipped to decide something's worth, and secondly it's the democratization of media.

A few big companies largely control radio and television, and can decide who gets airtime. On the other hand, anyone can post a video to YouTube. Just as important, anyone can rate that person's submission.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia is great example of the wisdom of the crowd. Despite the bad reputation for being inaccurate, Wikipedia is in fact more accurate then Encyclopedia Britannica. Nature Magazine recently compared 42 articles from Wikipedia as well as Encyclopedia Britannica, and discovered Wikipedia had 4 errors per article while Encyclopedia Britannica had just 3. However, the Wikipedia articles averaged 2.6 times longer then Encyclopedia Britannica's. Meaning Wikipedia is more accurate page per page.

Wikipedia requires about 9 million dollars a year to run (mostly for bandwidth), however the value of the editing that takes place on Wikipedia (based on a modest hourly wage) is hundreds of millions of dollars."The greatest lesson of Wikipedia is that people are basically good" – Jimmy Wales (Co-founder of Wikipedia)

Mahalo
Sowhat of Yahoo!'s "antiquated" idea of indexing the web is by hand? Enter Mahalo. Mahalo's directory employs human editors to review websites and write search engine result pages. These pages include text listings, as well as other media such as picture and video. Each Mahalo search results page includes links to the top seven sites, other categorized information, and additional web pages from Google. The company also employs freelancers to create pages for piecework compensation in the Mahalo Greenhouse - prior to appearing in the main index, a full time staff member approves the pages.By the end 2007, Mahalo had already indexed the top 25,000 search terms.So what's old is new again, and people are what count more and more in our increasingly digital world.

The Importance of YouTube

YouTube, the creation of three former PayPal employees, has changed the world of online video and media in general.

Formed in February 2005, YouTube was soon purchased by Google in November of 2006.

While video on the internet is far from new, YouTube has some of the most watchable content streaming on the web. While Apple's QuickTime streamed video in 1999 and Real Network's Real Player in 1997, these were (especially in the 90's and early 00's) usually grainy video, not much bigger then a postage stamp.

These solutions also required the downloading of software especially for this purpose. This created a problem for web masters, as they needed to host multiple versions of the same file (wasting space and time), as well as a hindrance for users who needed to know which player they had and which file they should choose.

YouTube bucked the trend by building their player around Abode's Flash. Abode Flash is installed on 99% of internet desktops as compared to QuickTime's 65%, and Real Player's 38%. This means that the vast majority of people could begin watching YouTube videos right away, with no software to download.

Those that couldn't merely needed to download Abode's free software.

In addition, YouTube isn't only available on computers; it is compatible with most "Smart Phones" (and even some "Dumb Phones"), Apple's iPod Touch and Apple TV, Nintendo's Wii, Sony's PS3, some versions of the Tivo and many other set top boxes.

While the quality of YouTube's videos began modestly with standard resolution below that of the average television, they introduced "High Quality" mode in 2008 with resolution comparable to a standard TV. In November of that year they introduced HD with 720P video, and this week they introduce 1080P video.

1080P is also referred to as "Full HD" and is currently the highest quality signal available for consumer devices.

In other words, YouTube offers the same resolution as a Blu-ray player.

Some interesting facts about YouTube:

• It is estimated that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.
• It is estimated that 20 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute. Consider this; If 99% of it is garbage, that's still 12 minutes of good content uploaded every minute.
• YouTube is the fourth most visited website on the Internet, behind Google, Yahoo! and Facebook.
• Over 1 Billion YouTube video's are watched every day. (Best estimates are 1.2 Billion per day)
• YouTube Partners make money off YouTube. YouTube partners get paid every time someone views their video.
• Teen sensation "Fred" makes 6 figures a year (exact amount undisclosed) from his YouTube channel.

See what J Imaging Design has done on YouTube, visit http://www.youtube.com/user/jimaging