US Open: Worse HD coverage than the World Cup
By Matt Burns 
posted Jun 19th 2006 10:22AM
posted Jun 19th 2006 10:22AM
Did anyone catch the US Open over the weekend? It was a great sporting event that was butchered by piss-poor HD coverage. There wasn't a five minute interval that didn't have at-least three SD camera shots in it. The event was supposed to be in HD but ESPNHD and NBC continually switched to non-HD. This is somewhat of a common thing on a large course like Winged Foot but both stations insisted on presenting us with Stretch-O-Vision. Normally, ESPNHD would put their logo bars on the side, but that didn't happen this time. One of the best SD camera shots was of a golfer teeing off and they switched from their HD feed to an SD feed and you could clearly make out the other high-def camera that was just on. Now we know many of you had issues with the World Cup coverage but there is no way it was worse the the US Open.
Agreed. I was really disappointed in the coverage because I heard so many great things about the Masters HD coverage, but I don't have CBS in HD, so I didn't see it.
Adding to the problem of the frequent SD shots was the fact that even the HD shots had lots of blocking with motion and it wasn't that crisp. I think the HD shots looked better on ESPN-HD. Someone on the AVS forums said that NBC uses a different method for passing the HD stream so that is why the PQ suffered.
I didn't see any instances of Stetch-O-Vision during the broadcast. All the SD shots I saw were widescreen SD, which looks a ton better than stretched SD. I was disappointed by the number of SD shots that were required, but I'll take some widescreen SD to get what we got in HD anyday.
The reason the CBS broadcasts of the Masters didn't have to resort to SD shots is because Augusta National is hardwired with fiber all over the course so no wireless shots were required.
I love reading your site but it bothers me when not the right words are used - 'than' instead of 'then' in your title. Please correct.
Thanks.
Agree. This was the first golf tournament I've been able to watch in HD so I was disappointed seeing so many SD shots.
On a side note, the word 'than' was correctly used in the title of this post. F. Villa needs to check his/her own spelling and grammar - "when not the right words are used." Should be - "when the right words are not used." Please correct.
Yea, it was pretty terriable. But it was because at the Masters, Agusta allowed CBS to burry miles of fiber cable under the golf course. This isnt feasable with the US open because it is in a different place every year. This was the first time that the HD camera's used the RF transfering on such a large sacale, so they couldnt go all HD. NBC actually didnt do to bad considering it was the first time they ever used RF HD. This is important becuase they will also need it for future Golf events, and for Sunday Night Football. But what really sucks is NBC compressed signal. It wasent the cameras that were the problem, it was the compressed singnal going to the distributers.
It seemed to me that the cameras roving on the course and following the golfers around were SD, while the fixed cameras at the tee offs and greens were HD. The HD shots looked terrific on my Sharp 37" LCD TV.
I was at the US Open and was looking to see how NBC had it set up. All of the cameras in the towers behind the greens were HD and there were hard wired HD handhelds mounted on tripods behind many tees. There were towers on about four fairways that had HD cameras but the rest of the fairway shots were from mobile cameras mounted on small trucks that were not HD and not hard wired. They, along with the non HD roaming handhelds were transmitting to three RF towers placed around the course. Also, there were two Met Life blimps floating over head.