Clear Picture, Fuzzy Future

By Barry Hillenbrand/Tokyo

The pictures on the screen of the two huge high-definition TV sets in a Tokyo hotel ballroom last week were crystal clear. The colors were vivid. The resolution was so fine that the image of the five executives cutting a ceremonial ribbon looked almost three dimensional. The occasion: the expansion of Japan's HDTV broadcasting to eight hours a day, up from the one-hour tests begun in 1989. With its sharpness of picture and CD-like crispness of sound, Japan's HDTV has all the outward appearances of another grand success about to wash over the world.

Yet despite the lifelike clarity achieved after 20 years of research and at a cost of more than $1 billion, the future of Japan's HDTV program is far from clear. HDTV sets go for more than $30,000 each, which explains why fewer than 300 have been sold. While that price will inevitably come down, HDTV has generated only a lukewarm response in a country usually unable to resist new television technology.

Another problem is that the Japanese system is technically outdated. Because it was conceived 20 years ago, it is based on an analog system of transmitting pictures. Researchers in the U.S. and Europe have been moving toward a digital system that can be more easily integrated with computers and other advanced video technology. The unwieldy alliance -- business, government and public-TV broadcasters -- that is bankrolling HDTV in Japan has been slow in reacting to that technological challenge. "It is too late for us to abandon the old analog system," admits a Japanese electronics executive. "The future is digital."

U.S. and European researchers came late into the HDTV race, but are discovering that sometimes it pays to be among the tortoises. Says Howard Miller, head of engineering at PBS and a leading expert on HDTV: "Three years ago, it looked as if the U.S. would play no role in this major new technology, but now basic HDTV research work is coming out of American labs."

Already such U.S. companies as Texas Instruments and LSI Logic are producing ) designs in Japan for the complex semiconductors needed to process the massive amounts of data necessary to generate lush HDTV pictures. "There is plenty of room for American companies to take advantage of their strength in semiconductor design," says Keiske Yawata, chief executive of LSI Logic's branch in Japan. U.S. firms, including Zenith and General Instruments, are developing proposals for HDTV standards in the U.S., which will be chosen by the Federal Communications Commission by spring 1993. Even a digital system has its disadvantages. For one, the signal is so rich with information that it may have to be delivered to homes on fiber-optic cable, which is expensive to install.

If the U.S. adopts a non-Japanese system, as expected, Japanese consumer- electronics companies will end up paying licensing fees to American companies for the technology used in building sets for the U.S. market. But the Japanese manufacturers still have some important advantages as a result of their head start. Analysts tend to believe that the logos on most HDTV sets sold in the U.S. will be Japanese, even if American fingerprints are all over the chips and technologies inside. U.S. companies have simply dropped out of many facets of the video-manufacturing business. Still, with researchers taking such divergent tacks, the HDTV competition no longer looks like a race that will have just one victor.

With reporting by Mary Cronin/New York