Apple TV: Sharp or Not?

I was at an Apple Store (North Michigan Ave, Chicago) today and also noticed the lack of sharpness. More noticeable however was the lack of customers looking at the devices. While the Mac and iPod tables were busy as usual, not a single person besides me was at the row of five Apple TVs on display.

Sure – stop by my house in San Antonio. I have a 57 inch Mitsubishi DLP and a $500 video card in a home made PC with Vista Media Center – I’ll throw it up against your Apple TV (BTW, they don’t actually even include a TV with that darned Apple thing, do they?).

And we’ll use your eyes to judge – you’ll see the difference

Rob

The ones in the stores aren’t set to the best resolution? Really? OMG, call the FCC! The TV’s in the Big Box Stores are a) set to some ridiculous contrast, b)showing SD footage in “full” setting (eggheads) c) aren’t calibrated properly etc. etc.

Sometimes I wonder why these stores still sell HD Sets, considering how BAD they look.

The picture looks sharp to me and I’ve seen a half-dozen different AppleTVs in operation so far. Torres says he is not being toxic to Apple because he has bought some Apple gear on his blog. BUT, I’ve seen quite a few chronic Apple critics who will buy an Apple product or two as cover. People are supposed to think the person is not biased because of that. T’aint necessarily so. Methinks Torres’ heart belongs to Microsoft.

Kevin, considering the rate that the AppleTV is being hacked and the lengthy waiting lists for it at second tier stores, I’ll wager that the product will be a success.

Rob: I have a better TV here (Sony 60-inch rear projection). DLP’s look unsharp to me, especially during motion.

(And if I could edit my prior comment I would have started it, “No, you have a _bigger_ TV”.

Odd – not all my comments are showing up. Something you changed? Is my prior, prior comment in moderation?

Rob

I’m sure it would look just fine on my 12 year old rear projection monster… I need to get me an HDTV.

I would agree that the lack of sharpness has very little to do with the hardware. I actually really like my iBook, but on the few ocassions I’ve brought it to the Apple store, the sales people seemed clueless about anything but iPods. I doubt they can figure out how to set up an HDTV setup correctly.

“What should we use as the test as to whether it’s sharp or not?”

That’s easy: put a MSFT guy in front of it to declare it unsharp; put anybody else to…

Oh oh! There goes the “I have a bigger, better … than you” fight!

Robert, yesterday afternoon someone behind the scenes at Rocketboom was wondering if anyone had experienced RB on an AppleTV and wanted to know what the quality was like. I suggested and linked to your previous AppleTV post before seeing this one. Perhaps you could let them know?

It’s about 1/3 of the way down in pink background

It’s all a public service & I’m happy to do it

Rob: I see you posted #2 and #8. I didn’t delete any others, but I’ve been getting so much spam lately I can’t catch false positives. Repost and I’ll make sure it gets up. Did it have more than one URL?

Keep in mind that I looked at hundreds of HDTVs at CES last year and this and I just don’t like the DLPs. I quickly crossed them off my list (and I saw them inside National Semiconductor’s booth where they were properly setup and the lighting was fairly dark).

Rob: I see you posted #2 and #8. I didn’t delete any others, but I’ve been getting so much spam lately I can’t catch false positives. Repost and I’ll make sure it gets up. Did it have more than one URL?

Keep in mind that I looked at hundreds of HDTVs at CES last year and this and I just don’t like the DLPs. I quickly crossed them off my list (and I saw them inside National Semiconductor’s booth where they were properly setup and the lighting was fairly dark).

Is this any surprise? iTunes content is barely SDTV quality so of course it’s going to look like crap.

It’s bizarre that Apple sells SDTV content for the AppleTV, but the AppleTV will only work with an HDTV?!?

I don’t get it. Even if they do eventually offer HD content, why prevent AppleTV from running on SDTVs? What is the point of limiting a consumer’s ability to use this product with any old TV?

Is this any surprise? iTunes content is barely SDTV quality so of course it’s going to look like crap.

It’s bizarre that Apple sells SDTV content for the AppleTV, but the AppleTV will only work with an HDTV?!?

I don’t get it. Even if they do eventually offer HD content, why prevent AppleTV from running on SDTVs? What is the point of limiting a consumer’s ability to use this product with any old TV?

Mike: Apple TVs run just fine on SDTVs. Not sure where you heard they don’t.

From your brother probably.

Decent test: use your TV and someone else’s. To test all combinations (MCE w/yours, MCE w/ theirs, ATV w/yours, etc..)

Test Apple-purchased content and an equivalent file on both.

Test a standard video podcast. Test a hi-rez podcast.

Test movie trailers (for internet/streamed content)

Test streamed content, not just synced content.

Also view photos and album art.

Judge several criteria: dithering, frame rate, glitches, sharpness, etc.. independently

Then provide an overall judgment.

So I have a 1080p DLP projector on a 123″ screen.

I watched Season One of Prison Break on my TiVo Series 3 via Unbox at Amazon. I watched Season Two of Prison Break on my AppleTV purchased from iTunes.

The Unbox videos are dramatically sharper. The Unbox stuff was in the league of a DVD (not quite, but reasonably close). The AppleTV stuff is much much softer. Now, some people like a soft, film-like look. If that’s you – no worries. But for those of who like sharp video, there’s a difference.

I did try switching from 720p to 1080i per your suggestion in Palo Alto last week, but didn’t see a noticeable difference. (My projector has an awesome scaler that converts everything to 1080p anyway).

The Unbox video did have some artifacts in a few scenes here and there, though. Distracting, but not for most of the show.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, you and Maryam are welcome at our place any time, of course, if you wanna check it out. Just email/IM/Twitter or even call (if you must).

Don: hmmm, we’ll be over for sure!!!

The problem is that content sold on iTunes is usually 640×480 or lower. I don’t see any HD content available on iTunes itself. Except for video podcasts, and even then you gotta know to subscribe to the HD feed (Rocket boom, for instance, has a separate HD feed — if you subscribed for your iPod, you probably are on the low-res feed).

So, if you compare content, it definitely will be less sharp, but that doesn’t mean the hardware sucks, just that Apple needs to get us an HD version.

One thing I really wish is that Apple would make a deal with ABCTV. http://dynamic.abc.go.com/ has a new player (Windows only, sorry) which is AWESOME quality. All for those Lost fans.

Oh it’s sharp , but you have to be playing HD movies, the standard movie trailers / music videos are soft due to resolution. But photo’s and HD movies come out really nice, the HD movies are good enough on my 60″ Sony RearPro ( model before yours 720p native ), that I’m hanging out for a HD movie player now, or HD movie downloads from iTunes.
For an HD movie try “Warren Millers Higher Ground” 3 minute promo .

Robert – the problem with looking at TV’s as you describe it is that you have no comparative data – you are at a show, where everyone is using different sources and lighting.

I took my XBOX 360 and HD-DVD with me when shopping – I saw the same Spiderman II scenes on about 20 TVs. You like your tech, I like mine. But I still bet my Xbox 360 through my generic PC looks a hell of a lot better on my TV (or yours) than AppleTV does.

Rob

Rob: many of my friends have DLPs. I see the same blurring on all of them when there’s movement. They even have a name for this blurring “rainbow.” Not everyone can perceive it, though. It’s one of the main reasons I didn’t go with a DLP set, even though DLPs cost about half as much as my set did.

Mike was being an ass as usual and talking about iTunes content.

Either run a HD podcast or a trailer from the Quicktime site. The picture is superb. You cant fault the hardwar for Apples inability to get 720p content on the iTunes store. One has to think it cant be long before iTunes does go to 720p though

@Robert:

Yes, but Unbox is also standard-def. So theoretically Unbox and AppleTV should be equally sharp – but it’s just not the case. AppleTV is much softer.

I haven’t seen any compression artifacts to speak of, though, so it doesn’t seem like it’s an issue with the bitrate per se, but possible more of a resolution or encoding issue. It’s entirely possible the folks at Apple intentionally encode it softer for some reason.

The more likely, though, is resolution. Quicktime reports these video files as being 640×360. NTSC (aka SDTV in the US) is 720×480. If Unbox is 720×480 and AppleTV is 640×360, that would certainly explain the softness – 230K px vs 345K px (50% more!) is nothing to sneeze at. As the AppleTV up-rezzes the image, the image either has to get softer or blockier. Since blocky is bad, I’m sure they err on soft.

Give it a shot yourself – try up-rezzing a 640×360 image in Photoshop to 720×480, or even better, one of the HD resolutions like you’re running your AppleTV at: 1280×720 or 1920×1080. See how soft it gets.