Is it possible that the most important new product shown at the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) in Las Vegas in April was a test pattern? Read on.

There is no question that the 2008 NAB equipment exhibition was strange. Official figures show attendance down slightly from 2007, but a common refrain from those who were there was that it was down a lot, reflected in an ability to get a taxi without waiting. But taxis are not why people come to NAB shows, and, when it comes to new equipment, there was plenty.

Last month, this column covered some of the new developments in acquisition (shooting) technology. This month's will touch on storage, processing, distribution, presentation, and test and monitoring technologies.

Consider just that last category. Since the advent of television, the most important tools for judging picture and sound quality have been eyes, ears, and brains. If you've been trained (even just by experiencing many hours of videography), you can tell whether something looks or sounds good or bad, whether it seems amateur or professional, whether it has good lip sync, etc.

Unfortunately, it might take you a while to make that judgment, and determining whether a setting works better one way or another requires a separate evaluation for each parameter. Today, there are more adjustable parameters than ever before, and one person might be in charge of many television streams at once. Help is required.

Sarnoff Corp. pioneered the development of automated picture analysis intended to respond as a human observer might. Tektronix used Sarnoff's JNDmetrix technology in their first PQA product in 1997, a picture-quality analyzer, rather than previous technical-parameter analyzers.

Since then, many companies have introduced picture-analysis products, and Tektronix has refined its own, each having somewhat different characteristics, just as human observers might differ in their evaluations. Unfortunately, that characteristic of human observation—that we are all different individuals—doesn't bring testing nearer to the goal of numbers that everyone can agree on. What was perhaps most interesting, therefore, about Opticom's PEVQ perceptual-evaluation video-quality analyzer, shown at a tiny NAB exhibit this year, was that it was said to match a new International Telecommunications Union standard on the subject.

Picture-quality analysis might seem to have little to do with intellectual-property piracy, but Japan's KDDI presented a different point of view. Prohibiting unauthorized recording is a common anti-piracy tool, but, if it also prevents copying home video recordings, consumers complain. One feature of KDDI's Pirated Video Detection Tool, therefore, is the ability to determine whether a sequence was amateur or professional.

One way professional acquisition might differ from amateur is in highlight clipping due to excessive exposure. Videographers have long had access to so-called "zebra" patterns, which introduce stripes to indicate highlight clipping. At the NAB show, Supertron showed alternatives, including red, boxed viewfinder indications and simultaneous horizontal and vertical waveform indications at the edges of a picture, with coordinate lines connecting image highlights to their voltage representations.

The preceding test and monitoring systems deal with actual pictures. Then there are test signals.

Color television brought color bars. They were used initially for setting up camera encoders and then video playback and transmission systems. In their latest incarnations, they can be used to set the gain, equalization, and black level of a composite-analog video circuit and the saturation, phase, and brightness of a composite-analog picture monitor. Composite-analog video signals, unfortunately, are on the way out, yet color bars remain our most common test signal.

Enter Sarnoff's new test pattern. For purposes for which color bars remain useful, it includes color bars. There's also much, much more.

There are moving elements and noise to stress bit-rate-reduction ("compression") systems. There are so-called moving zone plates to check resolution (in black and white and in color, in every direction). Monitor brightness, contrast, and color can be set with much greater precision.

Compression fidelity, lip-sync (coarse and fine), format conversion, color-space mismatch, chroma subsampling, field sequence, white and black clipping, bit depth, skin tones, overscan, dropped frames, recording-system identification, and color fidelity are just a few more of the parameters that can be checked with this single test signal. Best of all, it needs only an observer with picture and sound monitors—no other test equipment—at the far end.

The question of which picture monitor is a difficult one. Videotron's VC-202 video checker automatically identifies just about any uncompressed form of video that can be sent over a coaxial cable, from analog composite to high-definition digital, but the monitor on the tiny, hand-held device is hardly of reference quality.

Off the show floor, eCinema Systems showed its new DPX monitor, said to be the first LCD that can deliver reference black. On the show floor, many other companies offered their versions of LCD, plasma, or even rear-projection reference displays, using commonly available technologies.

Sony offered different options. One, exhibited in its own booth, is organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology, allowing super-thin TVs and viewfinders. The other, a spin-off Sony technology called nano-Spindt field-emission display (FED), was exhibited in the Astro, Ikegami, and Field Emission Technology booths.

Both OLED and FED are emissive displays, so when a pixel is "off" it emits no light, allowing for a flat, dark black. FED technology uses picture-tube-type phosphors driven as they are in picture tubes, so it offers all of the benefits of the best tube-based picture monitors combined with advantages of flat-panel monitors (edge-to-edge sharpness, light weight, negligible depth, low power consumption—dramatically lower than even comparable-size LCDs—etc.). FEDs were also demonstrated at the show with high temporal resolution (240 frames per second), offering a new sensation of realness. One problem with the Field Emission Technologies displays (the same shown by Astro and Ikegami), unfortunately, is that a factory has yet to be built to manufacture them.

Of course, there are many applications for video displays beyond reference monitoring. CNN has received much press coverage this election season for Perceptive Pixel's Multitouch Collaboration Wall, which The Washington Post called "the gee-whizziest TV-news gizmo since the animated weather map." At NAB 2008, Barco showed a display that could extend the concept to an entire studio backdrop.

On a smaller interactive-monitor scale, Wohler joined with Intracom to show Touch-comm, an audio-video monitoring panel that can become a matrix intercom, one that can communicate with any Internet-connected device anywhere in the world, even Antarctica. A mobile phone can become a full-control matrix-intercom station.

Intercom is an example of signal-distribution technology, and there were many other innovations in that field at NAB 2008. Consider, for example, the AOptix LCT-5 bi-directional, uncompressed-HDTV, free-space laser link. It allows full HDTV camera control and transmission between two points with line of sight.

For shorter distances, there is the IDX CW-5HD, a thin, lightweight, relatively inexpensive camera-back attachment that can transmit uncompressed HDTV over Wi-Fi-like distances. The lack of compression removes worries about lip-sync. But W&W Communications showed that lip-sync worries can be eliminated even in compressed transmission systems. Their "Super Low Latency Technology" offers H.264 coding and decoding taking as little as two thousandths of a second, far less than a single video frame and well within the most-stringent lip-sync requirements (roughly equivalent to the acoustic delay of a microphone placed two feet from a mouth or a speaker two feet from an ear).

There is no particular distance associated with compression coding. It can be used between a camera and its nearby control unit or for a roughly 45,000-mile round-trip to a satellite. Traditionally, satellite transmission has come in two forms: mobile or fixed single-dish earth stations aimed at a single satellite and multi-dish satellite "teleports" that can transmit to or receive from multiple satellites at once and may be used to relay signals from one satellite to another.

At NAB 2008, both Hurst USA and Satellite Technology Systems showed multi-dish mobile units, in effect transportable teleports. They can handle both C- and Ku-band transmissions. A third dish can even provide Internet access separately from program transmissions.

Of course, the Internet can be used, itself, for program transmission, and there are many technologies—from Bluetooth to Wi-Fi and more—that can provide a wireless data connection. Sprint's Power Vision and Verizon Wireless's V Cast, for example, can already deliver television to a mobile viewer's hand-held phone via EV-DO technology.

Last month, consumer-electronics manufacturers LG and Samsung, which had previously introduced different, incompatible systems to allow U.S. television broadcasters to transmit robust signals to mobile devices, said they would come up with a single, joint system. But theirs were only two of 15 different systems shown at NAB 2008 for broadcasting to mobile devices, and that number excludes a Micronas-Thomson proposal.

Transmission isn't the only issue associated with mobile-TV viewing. Can programming intended for home TVs work on handheld devices? Snell & Wilcox considers the question so important that it created a new division, Amber Fin, just to deal with what it calls iCR, intelligent content repurposing.

That wasn't the company's only news in the processing field. There was, for example, also "fluid effects," a way to map video so one image can appear to be, say, a curtain being opened to reveal another.

The Abekas Air Cleaner deals with a more mundane issue: what to do in the event of a "wardrobe malfunction" or slip of the tongue. Traditional solutions—cuts to black or color bars or bleeps or silences—call attention to the problem. Air Cleaner just momentarily makes pictures go out of focus or scrambles sound.

Other live-TV problems can include too much contrast, as when a portion of an athletic field is in shadow. Storenet's D-rex, using Apical perception technology, acts as a sort of video-operator-in-a-box to improve pictures after they've been shot. Similarly, eMotion's Digicrank can provide fluid slow motion even for video already shot at a normal frame rate. And NTT's multi-view coding can move camera positions after a show has been shot.

"Multiview" usually has a different videographic meaning, the ability to see multiple images on a single display. NVision's new Synapse multiviewer technology has only a single field of latency, making it ideal for live production.

Xeno's UCCTOP laptop-computer-sized device has multiviewing. It also has camera, lens, and mount control; audio and video mixing and effects; recording, playback, editing, graphics, and machine control; and encoding and distribution. The Rushworks Remo is similar but manages to squeeze four camera systems into its slightly bigger box.

Quantel showed stereoscopic-post processing, and TDVision's TDCodec uses eye-view redundancy for 3D compression. Wafian and Codex showed 3D storage systems.

In other storage developments, Qualstar's BQ series offers a 3,168-hour library in roughly one foot of rack space, and Convergent Design's XDR offers hot-swappable CompactFlash-card recording (currently up to 256 GB) in a hand-held device. SeaChange has joined Toshiba in offering solid-state servers; JVC's MR-HD200, mounted on one of its camcorders, offers tape, disk and solid-state HD recording in a single package; Thomson's Rev Pro ER offers 65 GB for under $80; and Red Ray offers not just HD but 4K recording on conventional DVD media.

There was plenty more at the show, from Panasonic's <$11,000 AV-HS400A HD production switcher with 3D effects and multiviewing to JL Cooper's and Tangent's control surfaces for Final Cut Pro. Alas, there was no sub-$50 150-inch 4K display, dag NAB it!