With their sales booming thanks to the appeal of flat-panel televisions, consumer-electronics manufacturers are grumpy at what they charge is a lack of follow-through from European broadcasters.
Those pent-up frustrations have emerged at IFA, the annual show in Berlin of the newest digital entertainment devices which opens to the public on Friday for a six-day run.
Western Europe is the world's biggest market for flat-panel televisions and viewers could rightly expect high-definition images to match from the broadcasters, the president of Sharp Europe, Toshiyuki Tajima, told reporters at IFA.
"Broadcasters are not keeping up with this development," he said, referring to the PAL and SECAM television pictures made up of 625-lines, which are the current staple of European telecasts. PAL and SECAM are technical standards for colour TV.
High-definition television (HDTV) broadcasts, using pictures comprising 1,080 lines, are still rare in Germany, Europe's most populous country. The flat-panel screens on offer, most of which have a 720-line picture, use software to "improve" the PAL images.
The German pay-TV broadcaster Premiere broadcasts some HDTV and a commercial broadcasting group, ProSiebenSat.1, has upgraded some of its transmissions by satellite to HDTV, but the great bulk of German TV remains PAL.
German public broadcasters say they will not be offering plentiful high-definition viewing till 2010, though their live coverage next year of the Olympic Games from Beijing will be available in HDTV form.
Surveys show only limited interest in HDTV among European consumers who for decades have enjoyed notably better images than the 525-line NTSC images used in Japan and the United States.
Manufacturers feel let down by the inertia of the German public broadcasters.
"It's their slack attitude that's annoying," said Frank Bolten, head of Sharp's Germany and Austria division. Manfred Gerdes, head of Sony's German division, said 15 per cent of German homes were now equipped with screens ready to handle HDTV signals and that rate would probably rise to 25 per cent next year. This created a moral obligation on the public broadcasters.
-DPA
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