The battle for supertelevision

Europe and Japan are waging a technobattle over how best to provide the public with top-quality television pictures in the 1990s. Over the past dec- ade, the Japanese broad- casting authority, NHK, has been perfecting a high- definition television system that uses 1,125 horizontal lines across the screen, in- stead of the 525 lines they and the Americans use at present. This offers much finer grained pictures- better, in a sense, even than film. The Japanese, with the Americans and Cana- dians in tow, have been pushing hard to get their high-definition television (HDTV) system adopted as a world standard. The Europeans are adamant that it should not be. At a recent meeting of the In- ternational Radio Con- sultative Committee in Yugoslavia, they man- aged to get the issue deferred for another four years of discussion. With better-quality pictures from 625-line television, Europe"s broadcasting engineers do not see the NHK pro- posal as an answer to their own problems. The two si...