Comments/Questions about the Cnet Review.
Posted on: Sat, 08/30/2008 - 17:46
tbthomp2
Joined: 2008-08-25
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Comments/Questions about the Cnet Review.
One of the biggest detractors mentioned in the review was the mouse latency issue. It's said in the FAQ that "We’re still working to reduce latency further so future software upgrades will improve your system’s performance." How much improvement can reasonably be expected?
The reviewers at Cnet also mentioned - when commenting on picture quality - that they saw some "shimmering that appeared to be RF interference." That's the first place that I've read any mention about picture quality issues. Any ideas on what they might have experienced?
As for the rest of the review - I thought in some areas they were kind of harsh. It was a distinction between judging how well the product did what it was designed to do, and how well it did what they would have liked it to do. I think the later played more importance than it should of. Anyway - you can see my comments on that here:
http://news.cnet.com/8601-17938_105-10029147.html?communityId=2007&targe...
Latency is one of those issues that we continue to work on. I hesitate to commit to an exact number, but we think that there is room for good improvement. Any time we make changes in an area as critical as this, we have to test against a whole host of televisions since there is huge variation in TV behavior in the wild. It won't be tomorrow, but not too long.
The reviewer also mentioned "shimmering" that he took to be RF noise. Well, it is a digital signal, so video effects that in the old days would be attributed to noise are probably something else. We have tested extreme cable plants to find the limits of our tranmission capability. When the signal is on the edge of being receivable, the effect you see is entire squares or blocks likely corresponding to transport stream packets dropping out. Random noise does not affect the signal, it is either received, or not. No in-between.
Shimmering is more likely an MPEG decoding artifact. Some TVs, and I know Panasonics are one of the types, are very aggressive on the edge enhancements, especially on the right-hand side of the "edge". Panasonics ship with the "Sharpness" setting turned almost all the way up. They very aggresively are trying to highlight the edges and in some cases leave an artifact on the screen. This can manifest itself like a "trail" behind moving objects. Usually just changing the video "Sharpness" setting to a lower value cures this.
Another possibility for the "shimmer" is if a laptop was being used in "clone" mode and the PC (not Zv) is selected as the primary. We have seen what is typically referred to as "tearing" with setups like this because the timing is specific to the laptop screen, not Zv and the HDTV.
Taking the laptop out of clone mode (so the internal monitor is blank) or when in clone mode setting Zv as primary (or first in the list) will clear up the issue.