As has been its custom for the past several years, ABC will again broadcast the Academy Awards in HD. As with sports, more and more live special events are being produced in HD with downconversion to SD for the NTSC audience.
HDTV production and downconversion is a good thing for the NTSC audience as well as the HDTV audience, because it improves the NTSC picture. Those who are familiar with video or digital still photography know that an oversampled image that has been subsampled to a particular resolution usually looks better than one that was natively captured at the lower resolution. Capturing at HDTV resolution and downconverting to SD generally affords the NTSC viewer a better image quality than that obtained by capturing at SD resolution to begin with. Although HDTV cameras have typically captured at the native HDTV resolution, the better SD/NTSC cameras have sensor arrays that capture at resolutions much higher than the ultimate SD resolution. Because of factors like modulation transfer function (MTF), the subsampled output image is superior to the one that would have been obtained if the content was captured in SD resolution. This is why high-end SD cameras have capture resolutions so much higher than the NTSC transmitter is capable of passing. The same principle is at work when capture is done at HDTV resolution and down-converted. We can extrapolate this to a general principle--HDTV is good for everyone!
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