Judging Quality

Silicon Optix's recently announced Realta is an image processing chipset for de-interlacing, noise reduction, scaling, and cadence detection. Realta will go inside HD displays, DVD players, and other video devices to help improve visual image quality and is likely to compete with technology from such companies as Faroudja and Pixelworks.

Silicon Optix's Realta image-processing chip makes the company's trademarked Hollywood Quality Video image quality possible.

Realta's processing power is the result of the Silicon Optix's partnership and eventual acquisition of Teranex, a regularly acknowledged leader in broadcast-level upconverting and image processing. A three-year development process has effectively reduced much of Teranex's rack-mount chassis full of capabilities, plus Silicon Optix's own image-manipulation expertise, to fit on a single chip. The aim is to bring Hollywood-quality image processing to affordable home theater and professional AV products.

It's rather exciting news for an industry that has been using a lot of the same image-processing technology for a few years. A new company vying for market share means lower prices and better quality directly or by driving everyone's R&D.

Yet, it's not the kind of news that generally means all that much to the user. Realta will be sold to product manufacturers who will then integrate it into their displays and players. For general awareness, the best that Silicon Optix can do is create a brand, like Faroudja's DCDi, that might be recognizable to a technically astute minority of potential buyers. Silicon Optix is already pushing HQV (Hollywood Quality Video) in hopes of generating momentum for an HQV logo that might appear on products or at least on product boxes and collateral material.

Silicon Optix is confident that Realta will yield noticeable improvements over competitors, but the product will carry a premium price. That leaves the company with having to compete with established names and brands in an industry where price is king and cost of goods can make or break a business model.

Silicon Optix sees a significant opportunity as the video and display industries move toward high-definition, especially when much of the content shown on HD-capable displays will be upconverted from standard-definition originals. HD displays tend to hide less noise and generation loss of analog sources and expose more compression artifacts created by digital post-production or transcoding between multiple formats.

Realta comes with an impressive list of technological capabilities. According to the company, HQV means full-resolution 1080i de-interlacing with four-field interpolation for maintaining smooth motion and intricate details. A 10-bit filter helps remove jagged edges on diagonal lines, one of the hallmarks of upconverting, and 10-bit color processing begets 4:4:4 sampling and the ability to display more than 1 billion colors.

HQV also means pixel-by-pixel noise reduction to hide the inevitable noise from analog source material or the compression artifacts of MPEG or DV. A 16 to 1024-tap adaptive scaling engine over-samples source material to maintain quality, but also to add quality by interpolating between standard-definition pixels and enhancing detail. Realta leverages Teranex's film-cadence detection to properly display not only 3:2 and 2:2 sequences, but also Vari-speed cadences like 3:2:3:2:2 and animation cadences like 5:5, 6:4, and 8:7. Realta has the ability to detect and separate video and film elements within a frame — overlaid graphics, titles — and render them on a pixel level to ensure the highest quality. The bottom line is that Reatla is capable of performing more than 1 trillion operations per second.

For front- and rear-projection applications, Realta will include Silicon Optix's e-WARP for geometric correction and off-axis viewing. That includes high-quality keystone correction and cornerstone adjustment to retain detail.

Judging quality can be a bit tenuous in isolation, especially on individual displays. Video shown on any display had to be created by a camera or computer in a specific format, and will have been edited on a system, if not up- or down-converted or otherwise processed. Visual artifacts can be deceptive because from where they come in the process is often unclear. To the average consumer, quality can be something of a personal preference; if not a moving target.

What do all of Silicon Optix's technology bullet points mean to the person buying an HD display? And how does one evaluate quality? For Silicon Optix, those questions are at the heart of selling more Realta chipsets.

Smartly, Silicon Optix's engineers, in consultation with industry experts, have created a benchmark-test DVD that attempts to create visual tests for judging quality.

Evaluating the differences between displays comes down to looking at consistent source material, be that test patterns or specific video sequences, and seeing how each product handles different and difficult scene content. By creating a specific series of tests that highlight different potential trouble spots, Silicon Optix is also educating the buying public as to what is important to look for in a display and, ideally for Realta, what to demand from the end product designers.

Silicon Optix's HQV Benchmark disc isn't the only such tool, of course. The AVIA Guide to Home Theater and Joe Kane's venerable Digital Video Essentials are two others that serve a similar function of both educating the public and providing consistent and controlled methods for evaluating displays and display products.

Admittedly, the first version of the Silicon Optix HQV Benchmark DVD focuses on aspects of video quality in which Realta excels, such as eliminating jaggies, noise reduction, and image detail, but it includes some thoughtfully created tests and test patterns and is a nice addition to a testing portfolio. Smartly, the DVD both exposes quality compromises and explains what each test is looking for and why it is important for one's ultimate viewing satisfaction.

While no firm plans had yet been set at press time, Silicon Optix expects to make its HQV Benchmark DVD available to the public. Watch www.siliconoptix.com (or www.hqv.com) for details or email hqv@siliconoptix.com. The disc will probably be available from Silicon Optix at industry trade shows, like CES in January 2005.

Jeff Sauer is a freelance video producer and industry consultant. He directs the DTV Group Lab, an independent research and testing facility in Cambridge, Mass.

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