Over the past couple of months I have been receiving, finally, a number of Blu-Ray discs, documentaries (BBC's Planet Earth, watch it at 1080 and be wowed) and movies and watched them on a large, 70" 1080 screen. All I can say is, Gents, SD, no matter how well it has been executed, is relegated to history. Unfortunately, it seems that a lot (majority?) of the LCD and plasma screens currently on sale are not 1080 but 720. Presumably the difference between HD on a 720 and SD is not as remarkable. That might explain some comments on store demos. But the public will learn soon enough. I note that our Oman TV salesmen have latched onto 1 megapixel (720) and 2-megapixel (1080) nomenclature for the new TVs. They have realised that the public knows that 2 megapixels must be better... Last week I received a Canon HV20. The PAL version cost me $1250, and when I played with it and looked at the results on the large screen, all I can say is that for around $1000 for the NTSC version, this is a major, major breakthrough in prosumer video. Reminds me of the first consumer DSLR, the D30. It killed film within 3 years. My strong advice is simply, if you can possibly avoid it, do not invest any significant sum in the acquisition of new SD camera gear, 3 CCD or whatever. Play for a few minutes in a store with that toy-sized HV20, look at the images on a large 1080 screen, and you will be ready to bear the vagaries of editing HD. Larger screens are well on the way, and the larger the screen, the more strongly you will be convinced. Well executed SD may well be very satisfactory on a 36" screen but beyond 50" the differences become apparent. It's still early days and our own personal standards/perceptions are still evolving, but I would, at this juncture, say that that HV20 will still be quite satisfactory on a 100" screen. Not so for SD in a couple of years when the general public will also have raised expectations.
