This may appear to be late in the HD day, but yesterday (23rd October 2006), Polycom announced their new HD video conferencing solution for this highly competitive part of the market. The HDX 9000 series is available in three types that are described in the table below. Apparently the HDX9001 can be upgraded with the addition of a daughter board by an onsite technician.
The HDX9000 series is also available as an Executive system with two 50” plasma display panels shown below and Polycom plans to release a desktop version, but details have yet to be made available for this.
The HD claim is based on the 1280x720p resolution that although is not true HD (future releases will support 1080p video resolution), is still far greater than the 4CIF (704x576) resolutions currently seen at higher bandwidth conferences and means that standard XGA display panels can be used. Polycom have included their new SirenÔ22 (22Khz) StereoSurroundÔ.
All of this is fantastic, except that each of the systems out from individual video conferencing manufacturers seem to be proprietary. The systems are backward compatable so you can get negotiation with older systems.
You can only achieve this high quality video conference at bandwidths of 1Mb and above. In a point-to-point call in a large town or city this is fine, but for multi-point conferencing or if your office is on a trading estate outside of town, you could be hard pushed to achieve the bandwidths needed.
Can just the improvement in audio and video quality improve the productivity of a company? I can accept that the development of the H.264 protocol enabled good quality video and audio at lower bandwidths making conferencing cheaper improving ROI, but the race for HD appears to cost more in equipment and infrastructure and only improves the ‘in the same room’ feeling.