Anyone that has spent any time in American hotel rooms will know why the NTSC television transmission system is popularly styled Never Twice the Same Colour: unless the set is very good, it’s usually predominantly mauve, orange or green. But help may be at hand. Revitalised Zilog Inc, which is now building a portfolio of chips that might be useful on the InfoBahn, mostly by licensing technologies from third parties and putting them into silicon, has picked up Los Gatos-based QD Technology Inc’s video enhancement technology and plans a video enhancement chip that will use signal processing techniques to improve the picture quality of a conventional television signal to a quality that it reckons will approach high definition television. Previously marketed for the professional video industry, QD’s technology is now being offered for the consumer television market. The technology is claimed to convert standard NTSC composite video to near high-definition quality by conditioning incoming signals. Image processing compression eliminates dot-crawl and cross-colour to produce a much sharper image, Zilog says. The set is out now, but the partners did not say how much it costs.
