Comment Movies on units at Apple Store look terrible (Score 1) 270
I was at the Palo Alto Apple Store yesterday and saw that they had the Apple TV on display. They have three of them setup in the front right display area hooked up to some very nice Sony Bravia XBR LCD displays. The photo slideshow that was running on the unit I tried looked very nice but when I switched to watching a movie the video quality was horrible. I'm not sure what the exact resolution of the source material was but it looked no better than 480i/p and may have even been the standard 320 x 240 of iTunes videos. On top of that the bit rate the movies were encoded at was very low and there were compression artifacts all over the place. I tried three movies, The Incredibles, The Little Mermaid, and National Treasure and they all looked terrible. There was a couple standing near me at the other unit and they were commenting about how bad the video quality looked as well.
For a company that spends so much effort honing their marketing message this seems like a major blunder to me, though I don't know if this problem is unique to the Palo Alto store or endemic to all their stores worldwide. Now if these are iTunes movies (I've never used iTunes so I don't know what the videos are supposed to look like) it's commendable that Apple is following "truth in advertising" principles since their marketing slogan for the Apple TV on the Apple Web site is "If it's on iTunes, it's on your widescreen TV". However, they really need to get some DVD and HD quality movie clips on there to show off the true potential of the unit.
The other minor quibble I have with the unit I tried at the Palo Alto store is that the movie trailers that you can select don't appear to be already stored on the drive (I tried 3 of them) and you have to wait for them to download, which on the PA store's connection was really slow so I cancelled the download every time. Again it's nice that they are trying to show what the actual user experience is like but maybe they should have at least some of them preloaded as well. My guess is that some of those trailers are probably in DVD or even HD quality, given how long it was taking to download them, which would again help show off what the unit can do.
For a company that spends so much effort honing their marketing message this seems like a major blunder to me, though I don't know if this problem is unique to the Palo Alto store or endemic to all their stores worldwide. Now if these are iTunes movies (I've never used iTunes so I don't know what the videos are supposed to look like) it's commendable that Apple is following "truth in advertising" principles since their marketing slogan for the Apple TV on the Apple Web site is "If it's on iTunes, it's on your widescreen TV". However, they really need to get some DVD and HD quality movie clips on there to show off the true potential of the unit.
The other minor quibble I have with the unit I tried at the Palo Alto store is that the movie trailers that you can select don't appear to be already stored on the drive (I tried 3 of them) and you have to wait for them to download, which on the PA store's connection was really slow so I cancelled the download every time. Again it's nice that they are trying to show what the actual user experience is like but maybe they should have at least some of them preloaded as well. My guess is that some of those trailers are probably in DVD or even HD quality, given how long it was taking to download them, which would again help show off what the unit can do.
