By Craig T. Kojima, Star-Bulletin
Preston Watanabe shows one of Toshiba's new
digital TVs, with its wide-screen format.
KITV sets digital
TV in motion
It's the first in the U.S.
By Tim Ryan
to go all digital and means
crystal clear images for those
wide-screen sets
Star-BulletinHAWAII will have the first all-digital television station in the United States when KITV completes in December its $15 million Honolulu studio and transmitters on Oahu, Maui and the Big Island. Digital television sets, which can pick up the new signal, cost a minimum of $3,000. But don't worry, you don't have to trade in your basic $200 television just yet.
During the conversion to digital broadcasting, the stations will continue to transmit programs in analog, allowing current TV sets to be used until the system-wide digital changeover in the year 2002, said KITV general manager Mike Rosenberg.
The DTV signal is incompatible with present standards and no current analog television set is able to receive it directly. Set-top converter boxes are expected to become available sometime during the changeover period, and prices on digital television sets are expected to fall in the next few years.
Broadcasting in digital provides viewers with crystal-clear pictures and sound, far better than the current analog transmissions. The new picture format offered by DTV allows not only for high-resolution but a wide-screen presentation -- at a ratio of 16:9 -- similar to an extreme horizontal motion-picture screen format. (Current analog television format is a near-square 4:3 ratio.)
What does this mean for consumers? Many of the picture flaws seen in current television sets will be absent -- that is, for people with digital sets.
"Ghosts" and snow will not appear on a DTV set. The digital system will be able to correct, or at least conceal, any errors that get picked up between the transmitter and the viewer's set.
Other problems in current sets -- like colors that appear where they shouldn't and indistinct and jittery edges of brightly colored objects -- will be corrected in the new digital images.
The combination of the wide-screen format and photographic quality resolution will allow a viewing of an entire football game from the 50-yard line, with no fuzziness or blurring of the images.
Aggressive data compression techniques developed for computers allow DTV to carry much more information on a single television channel than is currently possible.
One of the breakthroughs in DTV is that this extra information may be used in several ways. A station may decide to broadcast a single high definition TV signal, with a much crisper picture than is possible on current consumer television sets. Another station might decide to transmit multiple signals.
In addition, many stations will be able to use some of their bandwidth to send information unrelated to TV programming, such as computer or Internet data.
"KITV's digital television transmission will be capable of delivering four or more quality programs to viewers simultaneously," Rosenberg said. "They also will offer high-speed internet and other data services during most of the broadcast day, and superb theater-quality picture during prime time."
When KITV parent company Argyle decided to build a new television studio, officials decided to spend the extra money on the digital conversion and be "number one on the block," Rosenberg said.
