FEATURE ARTICLE (A00010):

The new generation of HDTV Plasma television sets on display at a Miami consumer electronics store.

The United States, Japan and Europe are racing to build bigger, better and much more expensive sets The wall-size television has images so sharp that watching it is like gazing through a picture window. On screen, a televised baseball game is under way: you can see blades of grass in the outfield, watch the pitcher's eyebrows, and hear the crowd as if you're in the bleachers. Technically it's called high-definition television (HDTV), but for most of us it will be a little slice of couch-potato heaven. It's the biggest change in television since the advent of color broadcasting, and it could arrive in the United States within five years. This is the television of the 21st century." The HDTV revolution started quietly in the early '80s when Japanese manufacturers unveiled a stunning new video system with a picture that resembles a wide-screen movie more than a traditional television. Using work they began in 1970, the Japanese also developed cameras, tape recorders and broadcasting equipment for the new format

"They started when nobody else in the world was thinking about how to improve TV," says Andrew Lippman of MIT's Media Laboratory. The inventors expected an enthusiastic reception for their tour de force which even then promised to reshape the video world, but they miscalculated badly. "They made the mistake, " says John Abel of the National Association of Broadcasters, "of assuming that whatever was good for Japan was good for the rest of the world."

The Europeans objected the loudest. In 1985 the European Economic Community announced that it would set its own standards for high-definition television. Unlike the United States, Europe still makes most of its own television sets; adopting a Japanese standard for HDTV sets would open the door for invasion from the East. "We would we wiped out," says Peter Groenenboom, managing director of Philips International, the giant consumer-electronics firm. The Europeans chose a system incompatible with the Japanese technology. That decision infuriated the Japanese manufacturers and led to delays all around; European HDTV receivers won't go on sale until 1992 or 1993.

The arrival of the new technology in the United States will force curious viewers to relearn how their systems operate. Simply put, there are three ways to send a signal to a home receiver: traditional broadcasting from a transmitter, known in the trade as terrestrial; second, through a wire cable, a method that now delivers telecasts to 51 percent of American homes, and third, by satellite to dish antennas placed on roofs or in backyards. The question now is which of these methods will be used to deliver the far more complex signals that produce the HDTV pictures.