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"   LAS VEGAS\u2014One way that this year&amp;#039;s CES resembles last year&amp;#039;s CES is the omnipresence of huge flat-screen TVs. One way in which it&amp;#039;s different is that the pictures on those TVs look a lot better than at last year&amp;#039;s CES. That&amp;#039;s not really because the TVs are better, though; it&amp;#039;s because the folks setting them up have done a better job of getting a clean signal to the sets.  Last year I heard several people comment about the lousy pictures on big display sets. In a way that&amp;#039;s shocking \u2014 this is CES after all \u2014 but on the other hand, not really. Getting a good HD signal to one set isn&amp;#039;t too hard, but getting a good HD signal to 50 or 100 sets is a lot harder.  And, actually, getting a good signal to even one set isn&amp;#039;t as easy as it might be. When everything works right, it&amp;#039;s okay. But often there are bugs in the system \u2014 HDMI devices that don&amp;#039;t handshake properly, bad cables, etc. A surprisingly large number of people with big flat-screen TVs don&amp;#039;t realize that they&amp;#039;re not getting HD at all, because they aren&amp;#039;t subscribed to HD cable. (A friend of mine visited some relatives with a big TV and no HD service; they didn&amp;#039;t know the difference and seemed happy, so he was in a moral quandary on whether to tell them).  Then again, cable HD service is often not so great. I was talking last night with some folks who were upset about the extent to which a lot of cable services compress their HD signals, producing a picture that&amp;#039;s not nearly as good as it should be in order to free up bandwidth for other channels. (They do this to an even greater degree with non-HD channels.) HDTVs are like anything else \u2014 garbage in, garbage out. If the signal coming into the set isn&amp;#039;t good, it doesn&amp;#039;t matter how good the set is.  Of course, the proliferation of high-definition consumer devices \u2014 from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD to the flood of new consumer level HD cameras \u2014 may change that. Once people get used to seeing high-quality HD images on their TVs, they&amp;#039;re likely to demand more from their cable and satellite companies.  Meanwhile, a few companies are beginning to push 4XHD \u2014 HD pictures with as many pixels as 4 1080p full-HD signals now. Where will the bandwidth come from? That&amp;#039;s what engineers are for, they say. Better give those engineers a raise, then! \u2014Glenn Reynolds  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a2471/4243815/>