Quote:
Originally Posted by Electronic M
Out here I've seen at least 4 sets literally put out to pasture...
The government was stupid allowing a non-backward-compatible format to supplant NTSC. If they had allowed compatibility new sets would have sold slower, their prices would have dropped slower, and the CRT sets would have been phased out gracefully, not in gluts.
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I think it would have been hard to upgrade NTSC to a significant degree while at the same time making the improved system backwards-compatible. They did try, and at least one 960ii system was tested (I think I may have seen a brief test of such a system on a Saturday morning circa 1985. For just a few minutes, a cartoon on ABC looked a little funny. They went to an ad break, in which the live action looked "a little jerky". Then, the "back to the program" bit on ABC involved an animation of a clock with a mechanical alarm ringing - and the effect was very obvious - the clock had two hammers! They switched back to normal-looking video about ten seconds after returning to the cartoon).
The real failure was in waiting FAR too late to invoke the all-channel act. If sets from 1991 onwards had ATSC tuners, most sets in use would have already been digital-ready by the time of the analog shutdown.