Still no comparison
 

Although I'm amazed by the clarity of HDTV, to me it still doesn't hold a candle to seeing color tv back in the 50's. It almost seems now like something out of place in the era. Programs in color! when most of the world was just getting used to B & W.

Sorry I guess it still brings back a very magical time for me.

if you look closely at any hdtv signal on a quality set it still looks like crap. there are digital artifacts everywhere in the picture. what was wrong with the analog system we are using now. the government had no business whatsoever sticking their stupid noses into the tv business as far as analog signal goes. hell fire what about the starving kids we have here and the government is going to issue $40.oo coupouns toward the purchace of hdtv to analog converters. hell they ought to have to furnish everyone with a new quality {ha,ha,ha,} hdtv set. steve

Good luck if you live in a fringe area and are stuck with ATSC tv. Plus, its great having the black bars take up half the screen on everything you watch due to the fact that HD programming in 16:9 has to be resized to fit on a 4:3 screen.

The issue of leaving analog and moving to all digital is purely about the issue of bandwidth and picture quality. The airwaves are a very very valuable and finite comodity. The bandwidth must be used for many many many different purposes. The most economical way to do that is to use the latest technology to transmit the information in an encripted digital manner, and be able to send 10 or more times the information in the same bandwidth.

(BTW the government has every right to tell the public how the airwaves must be used. The FCC has been doing that since it was established. The airwaves are the property of the government. Every government has the right to control the airwaves over it own airspace. The various frequencies allocated to various things such as Television and Radio are only "licensed" to the TV and radio stations and if the stations do not comply with the mandates of the FCC the license to use a given frequency can be revoked.)

As for the $40 coupon the government will be issuing, I figure I pay taxes, and the money is mine to begin with. But the fact is that those coupons will be used mostly by poor people who can not afford to buy a new TV with a digital tuner.

AS for picture quality... I live within the shadow (less then 1/4 mile) of no less than 6, 1000+ foot tall tv transmission towers in Milwaukee. I emphasize the word SHADOW. I have lived here since 1951 and have had problems with signal overload, ghosting, and cross chanel interference since the beginning because I am so close and the transmissions either overload my tv sets or the signal is blocked because I am to close to the base of the towers.

I recently purchased a Phillips 42" LCD HDTV with ATSC digital tuning. I now, for the 1st time in over 50 years, can receive PERFECT picture quality on every station that is broadcasting in digital format. The same station's analog signals continue to give me very shitty picture quality.

AS far as artifacts on a digital tv, that is due to either a much to highly compressed signal (one with less information than needed to fill a given screen size) or a very crapy digital tv that does a poor job of processing the digital information. A good digital transmission containing a sufficient amount of picture information, shown on a quality digital TV will run rings around the clarity and sharpness of any analog tv you can produce.

I get most of my program material from the master broadcast signals via a digital C-band satelite dish. (not the highly compressed and shitty Direct TV pizza dish... I am talking about the Big 10 foot type dish). I get both High definition and Standard Definition program material from more than 20 satelites in the Clarke belt. I can assure you that there is nothing that compares to a true High Definition broadcast shown on a quality HDTV receiver.

I enjoy my collection of old tv sets. I even enjoy watching them for the sake of nostalgia. But I will be the first to admit that their picture quality can not hold a candle to todays technology.

With reapect to fringe area broadcasts, you should be able to pick up digital broadcasts with a basic UHF roof top antenna up to 50 miles away from most digital transmitters without any degradation in picture quality. (no degradation in picture quality is the big plus of digital transmissions)

AS for the black bars on the sides of your screen, If you have a HDTV like my Phillips, there is a feature that automatically sizes the incomming signal to fit the entire screen regardless of the transmited picture format. I have no black bars on any picture I watch. The picture is automatically resized to fit the full screen

Thank you, thank you, thank you ohohyodafarted. It is good to read "notes of wisdom" from someone who can make honest, balanced opinions after having seen both sides of an issue, rather than just bash new technology because it is new. (How ironic is the concept of complaining about the new TV standards and government involvement, in a forum specifically dedicated to enjoying and preserving what was at the time a new TV standard that owed its availability to the government??) :rolleyes:

What most people do not realize yet is that digital TV signals almost always are much lower power than the same station's analog signal. When the analog stuff gets turned off in 2009, finally, the stations should be boosting their digital signals up to "normal" power levels. Fringe reception will then be a non-issue for many people, and remember, the signal they receive will be flawless, ghost- and snow-free.

Black bars are a good thing. The real travesty, still perpetrated by ignorant programmers such as HBO even in its HD version, is to mutilate movies to make them fill a 4:3 screen. Are there really people out there who would want every picture in an art gallery, every Picasso, Rembrandt, or da Vinci to have its top and bottom, or left and right sides, cut off so they all fit some matched-size frame? Do people not understand the concept is the same with motion visual programming? It is now the 21st Century... If you want to watch modern TV programming and have it fill your screen, get a wide-screen TV. Do not worry, no high-def TV programs will be produced in any aspect ratio other than the 16:9 that will fill all of your new screen with light, if that is so important. (Of course, all the "old" stuff will have black bars on the sides of the new TV; should we then complain about them not "fixing" those shows?) :)

I'm not disputing the advance in technology thru the years, only the initial impact of color vs hdtv.

Today with all the other distractions hdtv almost gets lost in the crowd

Back then tv was the thing, you didn't have cable, internet, video games and so on.

To add color back then was a pretty bold move and futuristic by any stretch of the imagination.

I hear you Oldtvman. I know what your are saying and I too feel no excitement with HDTV like I did when I got my first color set in the mid 60's. And when you think about what a grand engineering accomplishment the pioneers of early color had done, it is nothing short of miraculous. The state of technology at the time was very crude compared to what we have today. Jumping from a B&W tv to color and doing it in the same bandwidth with the crude circuitry that was available was a miracle of engineering. I guess we in this hobby of collecting and restoring these old sets all feel the same nostalgia for these old relics.

But time marches on and technological progress will not be stoped just because we long for the good old days.

In my short lifetime we have gone from the beginnings of tv in 1947 when a Dick Tracey wrist radio was a peice of science fiction, to a cellular telephone in everyones pocket that will take digital photographs and now also, watch live television on that palm sized device in nothing less than Living Color from NBC.

It's called MediaFlo and is available as we speek from Verizon in many major cities. And will be available in 2008 via Cingular (now AT&T wireless) It was invented by Qualcomm and will be in almost every city as soon as the tv stations vacate chanel 55 in the UHF spectrum. That will happen around February 2009 when all analog tv transmission is slated to shut down as mandated by the FCC. Unfortunately here in Milwaukee I will have to wait until the local chanel 55 station is forced to vacate it's spectrum, and give it over to MediaFlo.

I hate to poop on the parade, but I'm not all that impressed with most "new" innovations. Excepting the fields of nano-tech, DNA and other molecular level science, there isn't much out there now that didn't exist 20-30 years ago at a higher pricetag.

I laugh when the engineers I work with dismiss the technological feats of 20-30+ years ago as "crude". Half of them are out of their element when asked to do something out of thier comfort zone, (or do math without a calculator) let alone conceptualize an entirely new idea.

It's akin to shade-tree mechanics (on the other AK board) calling some kind of car "crap", but they're usually just mouthing what they've heard and can't back-up the "why".

You want to know what's crap? Ignoring the wants of the free-market to impose a system that will make the airwaves even more inaccesable to Joe Citizen. Putting a gun in my proverbial face and saying "Broadcast on analog and you will lose your freedom, because mega-corp X paid more to use it." Don't hand me the load of bull that says "We need the airwaves for police/fire/FBI/anti-boggieman" Since when have those organizations wanted to use the jammable open airwaves; 1935, when digital/sat. technology didn't exist?

This quote scares the crap otta me to think people actually think this way... Man our schools suck! The last two sentences should be followed by:

How many independant TV stations have become worthless because of the digital expense? Only the biggest handful of media monopolies can afford this tech + the FCC license. So long as I watch FOX or CBS, I should be getting both sides, hahaha!

The first time in 2009 a Tornado comes through and I have to turn on the old basement set but get nothing but static, I'll thank Sony, Hitachi, JVC and all the other foreign companies who lobbied my government to drop the "backwards compatible" FCC requirement for HDTV.

I'll make a point to do the same when landfills are overun with millions of TV sets made practicallyuseless overnight. Everytime a bird flies overhead and my OTA digital signal turns into a blue screen, I'll say "Thank God I didn't have to see some ghosting!" But then, I don't live under a TV tower, your reception may vary.

Seeing as how only the most epic of movies make use of a 16:9 aspect ratio, while most all camerawork ends up being facial close-ups, dumping a "square" ratio seems the height of stupidity for any visual medium. But at least newspeople won't be able to just get by with a pretty face now, seeing as how the camera will need to be way the hell back just to frame a shot.

I can't wait for TV to seem so real it feels like Fahrenheit 451

http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g2...enheit_451.jpg

Dam right, That was a good post. :yes:

In europe we're going to lose analog TV in 2012... but our digital TV will be basically just a digitized 4:3 PAL signal ,not a 16:9 HDTV signal

As far as i'm concerned, i'm going to watch TV as long as i'm able to do so with my 1976 Philips... i'm not going to spend a buck on any kind of Chinese made, SMD filled, robot assembled, disposable, stinkin' flat panel junk...

By the way, do people really need HDTV? (apart from teens techies) i don't think so... i still see a lot of very old sets and even B/W sets in regular use here...

Francesco

Actually Carmine if your are going to quote Karl Marx at least you could get the qoute correct.

Actually it goes like this

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

The basis of communism. To take from the haves and give to the have nots.

That is the exact philosophy of the liberal Democrats.

Anyhow I digress. Apparently you feel that the government should not have the right to control the airwaves. So lets extend your philosophy to the ultimate. Lets say that the US Government no longer regulates the airwaves (which according to you is the way it should be)

Now any Tom, Dick or Harry can transmit anything he wants at any power level on any frequency he chooses. Oh yes Carmine, that would be a wonderful way to use the airwaves. No more regulation, just a total bunch of chaos on the airwaves.

Please don't misunderstand me Carmine. I am not a proponent of big government. I happen to be an independent businessman and I lothe government interference. However there is a place for government regulation and the FCC is one of those areas that is necessary. Just as we need laws to prevent robery, murder, rape, and other types of social disorder.

Or would you have us go back the the 1950's-60's when cars didn't have a catlytic converter and spewed huge amounts of polution into the air we all breathe. I think we can all agree that clean air is a good thing and dirty car exhaust is not. Well.... there's another example of the government mandating an improvement that the private sector would not have taken upon themselves to impliment.

And the FCC decision to go digital with TV in order to open more chanels in the same amount of spectrum is a wise decission which efficiently uses the available bandwidth. And contrary to your postulation that it will eliminate many small marginal stations, the contrary is true. Going digital will allow a huge number of additional television licenses to be issued to many small marginal would-be broadcasters who would otherwise not have been able to afford the cost of a license because there wasn't enough bandwidth. I predict you will see a lot of new special interest group chanels such as public access which is only available now over cable. You need to open your mind to the possibility of having 10 times the number of chanels we now have under the analog system. All living in peaceful co-existance with each other, with no cross chanel interference. In essence, we will start to approach the kind of chanel diversity we can only have now over cable or satelite dish. With digital transmissions over the air subscription tv like HBO or Pay-Per-View will be possible. It wil open up more competition to the cable and satelite dish companies, fostering price competition and the elimination of the natural monopoly they now have. The future of digital television is bright and exciting.

I have said enough on this subject and strongly suspect that I will not be swaying anyones opinion. Therefore I am wasting my time trying to educate those who have a closed mind to this issue.

"10 times the number of channels" ? Yep, & they'll ALL be playin' that stupid "Head On ! Apply Directly to the Forehead !" commercial...Or have 10 stations playin' reuns of "Lawn Order" instead of 2.. Remember Bruce's spot-on song, "57 channels & nothin' on"..

Gosh Francesco,

Are you still riding from one village to another on horseback, getting your water from a well with a bucket, and craping in an outhouse overthere?

Do we "NEED" HDTV, probably not. the world would not come to an end if HDTV did not exist. But if you had it, you would not want to watch anything else. The picture detail is incredible.

To bad they chose not to do HD in your country Francesco. I guess you will just have to get a DVB (direct view broadcast) receiver and a dish to get your HD. Here in the USA our government made the "correct" decision and every American citizen will all have the opportunity to view the highest quality television picture that modern techonology can produce...over the airwaves and for FREE. I guess the EU will have to suffer with second rate quality television until your governments get with the program.

BTW I realy enjoy my
"SMD filled, robot assembled, disposable, stinkin' flat panel junk"
It has a better picture than your best euro-centric PAL tv set.

Don't get me wrong, I have a 37" Westinghouse LCD panel. I love watching HD programming on a set thats made for it, but i think this forced transition is going to cause alot of confusion. Not to mention the fact that most folks dont know what the difference between ATSC and NTSC in the first place. I've seen more people watching analog TV on an HD set, thinking its HD just because the label on the bezel says it is, than I ever wanted to. And to refine my previous post, I meant that everyone who will be using a coverter box on an older TV will have half of their screen taken up by black bars when watching 16:9 programming, heck, even the local news here is in 16:9 now. If we would just follow the british freeview DVB system and start with 4:3 digital, or simulcasts of both HD and standard format programs in digital, I think it would be a much easier transition.

:headscrat

Oh well on behalf of the US, I apologize for that.

As to the need for government regulation, I completely understand the need to regulate the airwaves. Digital & Analog have been peacfully co-existing for several years now.

Let the market decide. I'm sure any pro-capitalist would agree with that. :thmbsp:

I am curious how the "fringe area" reception will actually play out. My mother lives in a rural area around 70 miles from the nearest main network and PBS transmtters. Analog TV has worked well in this area (with an external antenna) for the 50+ years that I have been alive. There may have been snow at some times, but the channels were always watchable. I am not at this point sure that HTDV will work as well. Time will tell. If it does not, there will be a lot of complaints and there are a fair number of people in this situation.

My mother cannot use her digital cell phone at home as she is to far from the tower. When she had the older 3 watt output(seperate antenna and handset) analog cell phone, she had no problems. So much for digital in that area.

Well I don’t have a closed mind at all. But I do feel over the air FREE TV is dieing and this will kill it. People say that close to 80 % now pay for their TV service either from satellite or cable. The networks are turning into program suppliers not broadcasters.
When the public has to mess with digital they are just going to be confused big time. While the picture is great if the broadcasters start adding more channels their bandwidth for HDTV shrinks so don’t count on have great pictures if they add more channels.

And as for local channels they will never fly because the only reason they are on cable is because they have to be carried. There is very little viewer ship and this is after most of them being on for over 20 years. It is all about content and the local public access stations will never have content the public will watch. Just won’t happen. And I do agree how many times do we need to see “Law and Order”. Try and watch a movie on commercial stations with the spot load running at 15 min per hour most people can’t stand it. Really has helped the DVR market. Just my rant from a person in the bizz.

Once the transition to digital takes place there will be no "over the air and free". That will eventually go away it will be over the air and pay tv. That was the real push from broadcasters since it allowed local stations to compete with the cable station revenue streem. Charge advertisers to advertise, and then charge viewers to watch.

What good is all the eye popping high quality picture with such low quality programing? Besides we already had high definition tv. You can buy analog monitors now with over 800 lines of resolution, and the analog broadcast signal has always been viewed at a lower resolution. A properly set up professional monitor has just as good a picture (in many cases better since there are no digital artifacts) as most HDTV I have seen.

16:9 is fine if I have room for a 20 foot screen to watch it on. On a 50 inch it is a waste.

Bill R

---

No outhouse, and i have an electric pump for my water, but i do ride my horses, it's far safer and relaxing than driving a car in traffic

Let me say that i know what HDTV looks like, and i think i can live without the ability to see a billion of details on a 50" screen... 625 line PAL looks really good on my vintage 26" Philips CRT...

The EU and the Italian government had to retain the 4:3 625 line PAL standard to ensure compatibility with older CRT sets, which still account for about 80% of Italy's TVsets and are being replaced really slowly, it's not uncommon to see 20-30 yrs old sets and even some tube B/Ws in regular use here, especially in poor rural areas, they just get repaired and patched up over and over,

That's also why many DVB-T set top boxes sold here are fitted with an analog RF output, that's needed to feed the converted analog PAL signal in the antenna input of older sets without AV inputs.

Don't forget that many people cannot afford to buy a "new & exciting" HDTV set just because it's cool... they just need something to watch the news or a soccer match into...

Francesco

I LOVE my color roundies and it gives me a nice warm fuzzy feeling watching stuff on them and all that, but sorry, the picture quality, sharpness, lack of any noise and great detail of my OTA hdtv makes anything on my roundies look fuzzy and downright painful to look at in comparison. If I had to watch something in HD and then immediately switch to a roundie, I'd need some aspirin cuz it would give me a pounding headache.
Even when I'm watching something 4:3 on it that isn't HD it blows away my old color sets. Maybe it's cauze I'm using a late-model CRT projection set and not one of the inferior LCD sets, and have great reception where I am, and don't have cable or dish with their compression artifacts, but that's still where I fall on this subject. I love both technologies, roundies for the nostalgia and HD for the modern advantages.
As far as lack of decent programming, that has always been the case, and maybe even worse back then. Only 7 or 8 channels, and the vast majority of shows were junk or filler material just like now. Less commercials then yes. But 50 years of history gives one the luxury to start imagining that every show back then was the Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, etc etc., but it wasn't.

Well, 60s roundies have a coarse phosphor dot pitch and relatively simple tube circuits... my 1976 Philips K11 daily watcher instead has a tank-like solid state chassis with about 50 transistors and 20 ICs, an electronic tuner and an inline CRT with a really fine phosphor stripe pitch and produces a bright, crisp, wonderful, absolutely noise free picture just like a brand new PAL set... i can't really ask for more...

I'd like to see the picture quality of a 31 yrs old plasma... but there will probably be no surviving plasma sets 31 years from now, especially in working conditions... while my then 60 yrs old Philips will probably keep kickin'ass with its original capacitors :yes:

Francesco

===I'd like to see the picture quality of a 31 yrs old plasma===

Might have a sliiiiiiiight burn in problem... : )

Other than the clearity of HD, the old crt does a pretty good good of color accuracy. I've seen several of the flat screen technology that has reds that seem to wash out and flesh tones sometimes appear to have a silvery tone to them.

But Frenchy, the whole point of this thread is that back in the fifties, such things as detail and definition were'nt considered quite as important, but to add color back then, just to see shows in color was enough amazement for me, I wasn't fixated on DC restoration, detailing and so on.

'

I'm with ya, man. I come from the "Bert Lantz" school (he was Secretary of State under President Carter) of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." I think instead of forcing NTSC to go dark, there should have been a compromise where part of the UHF spectrum would be HDTV, we could go back up to channel 83, the old AMPS cellphone standard will be phased out this year. The other part of the UHF spectrum and the VHF spectrum would remain NTSC.

My 1982 Zenith can whoop some HDTV's in picture quality or at least give them a good run.

There are people like that over here too, I could hear my grandmother now if she was still alive. She passed on in 1997 but if she was still here, sometime in 2009, she'd be complaining that "I cannot get my 'stories' (soap operas) on my TV anymore." She used a 1962 RCA B&W TV, no UHF tuner, up to almost the time she died.

I watched Archie Bunker al ot and there is one time I have to agree with Meathead, his son-in-law, where he read on a box where it said, "new and improved," he said "what were we using before, old and lousy?"

I know someone else said this but I'll second it and say that I apologize on behalf of most Americans about that snide comment, there are times that we can be too arrogant for our own good.

Myself, I can't afford a lot of cool and new stuff,I struggle from time to time economically. Many say, "just buy a new TV," well there are times money is tight that it would take an Act of God to do that. Heck, I've been watching the same set for almost 25 years, a 1982 Zenith System III, I was a 16 year old sophomore in high school when we bought it new and now I'll be 41 next month.

By the way,

The shutdown last year of two out of three national AM public radio broadcasts has created a serious nationwide protest... they probably thought that no one was still listening to AM radio... they were wrong...

I can only imagine the reaction to the shutdown of analog TV broadcasts in 2012... millions of low income people and retirees which are struggling to pay the bills and make it to the next month will be forced to go out and spill 100 bucks for ABSOLUTELY no perceived benefit... or either stop watching TV...

And, by the way, our DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting - Terrestrial) set top boxes all have smart card slots and a couple of channels are already requiring payment, so we're probably going to lose free TV someday...

Francesco

Personally I do think HDTV usually looks a lot better than NTSC...however the difference does not mean enough to me to make me want to spend the dough for the new set! I do think my old sets do fine for me.
Every year though, the price of the HDTV sets goes down and there is more HDTV programming available.

I really don't see what any to-do is about this when conversion units for digital to analog will be available with US government funding for those who cannot afford them plus all new TV receiveing devices including TV sets, VCRs, digital recorders etc. must have digital capability.

Also I know several people who, even though they have cable, have hooked up their antenna again so they can get over the air digital HDTV broadcasts. I don't see how digital will decrease over the air viewing.

boy i can here the hackers now having fun with those cards that some stations are going to require you to pay a fee on to watch local tv. ha, ha, ha. i hope they get just what directv got in the beginning. and i made a lot off of directv not on fixing the cards mind you just selling the cards. i made thousands and not just a few thousand. that was the good old days wish i hadnt spent it all. steve

We are getting a better deal here in the USA. The government will send two US$40 coupons to buy tuner boxes starting next January or so, to any household that requests them. Digital tuner boxes are already available for US$80, and will probably be about $50-60 next year. Regarding "perceived benefit", with any halfway-decent antenna, these boxes will tune in perfect, ghost-free signals, and many stations already have two or more channels in the space of one analog channel. I have the choice of two 24-hour local weather channels, a 24-hour news channel, 24-hour children's commercial-free channel, and others, all crystal-clear (but those ones are not hi-def). At worst case, some people might need to add a US$10 RF modulator to the box. With that, for $25 I can watch all those added channels as well as all of the existing ones except they are clearer, on any TV made since 1946 in the USA... Certainly, anyone in the USA who thinks this is a bad "value" simply has no idea what really deserves complaining about.

The only real gripes I have with digital are bad reception (worse here than analog on the same channel) and the lack of backward compatibility with existing sets. It is not so bad for the large sets using a converter since they usually have something connected to them already such as a VCR, DVD player, etc. I'm really going to miss pulling one of my portable sets off the shelf, sitting it on the kitchen counter or out on the deck, plugging it in and watching. Now all my vintage portables will have to become table models with converters and modulators. I do like the fact that DVD recorders with digital tuners are out now. For my roundie I have one box connected to it which is a VCR-DVD Recorder-ATSC Tuner combo. I use a set of amplified rabbit ears on top of that and a modulator hidden behind the combo unit. It is weird, however, to see digital artifacts and pixelation on a 1960s TV.

If free TV ever goes away, I will reluctantly get cable for the house and use my Archos 604 WiFi media player as my portable set to watch recorded programs and converted DVDs.

As someone once said: Progress was alright once but it went on too long.

I've noticed that HD has such a good distinction between facial tones that you can see that people really do have more than one color in their face, as opposed to old sets where a person just seems to have a single 'flesh' color.
But then that's what Hollywood make-up is for : )

When analog tv goes away what is the incentive for price reductions in digital tuners. The only ones available here (they are no longer available) were $149 not $80. Even if the price drops to $50 I would have to buy 7 of them. Now the government is graciously going to give me two coupons, but what about the other $270 for my sets? I havn't seen a ten dollar rf modulator either, not here. Even at Wal-Mart they are $19.88. So lets see I am now at $409.16 plus tax that's $449.05. Thats almost four hundred and fifty dollars to watch the same sets I can watch now for free with a large antenna. Some "value".
Add to this the fact that I live between Memphis and Nashville. Here we have one ABC station, and one PBS station in Lexington. Memphis is about 80 miles away, and Nashville 130 miles away. Even the Lexington transmitter is about 30 miles away. With a large antenna I could receive the Memphis stations and the local stations, and if I turn the antenna the other way I could receive the stronger Nashville stations. Since the new digital stations will be UHF, at best I will be able to get our 1 local channel, and if there are no birds or bad weather I will get the 1 PBS station maybe, and those will eventually not be free. Some "Value".
Now if I had cable what would happen? Well if JEA of Charter follow the lead of Comcast I may have to still have a box for each set. At a cost of lets say $5.00 per box per month that would be an additional $35 per month to the cable bill, that's an additional $420 per year. Some "value".
Either way the average consumer gets screwed. I think this is something worth complaining about. The digital conversion could have been mandated to coexist or be backwards compatible with the current system. But then nobody would have any incentive to subscribe to the new digital channels other than for HDTV. Bottom line is that digital broadcasting was not consumer driven. It was purely corporate driven for profit. I am not against any company making profits, but I am against forcing it on people. Why not open UHF up to digital HDTV, and leave the rest alone? That way I have the option of buying digital with it's potential HDTV or not. The government does have the right to regulate the air waves spectrum usage, they always have. As a citizen I have the right to use them, and the forced change is going to force some people to simply not watch tv. I am not so sure that is a bad idea (not watching tv that is).
How about this a massive consumer revolt. Leave the system alone, or make it compatible, or we all stop watching broadcast television. For what it's likely to cost me I could buy the DVDs for the programs I watch most.

Just a thought.

Bill R

I cringe when I hear commercials advertising digital "HD" radio. They have already screwed up TV by going digital. If they mess with radio and make all my radios sets obsolete I'll really be mad. I agree with the earlier post. Make it backward compatible or limit it to a special band of frequencies and leave the current system in place. Sometimes good enough is good enough.

I have no less than 8 TV sets in use by now... including one in the barn i'm watching while i'm cleaning the horses stalls...

I'd have to get 8 boxes... that's 800 bucks... no way...

I think i'm going to buy one and feed its RF signal to all TVs in my home, and another one for the barn... as soon as they keep the current 625 line PAL system...

As i've said, i'm not going to buy a new HDTV... i'd rather quit watching TV

Francesco

"HD" radio is one of the biggest false advertising campaigns i've seen in a while. They market it as "High Definition", yet the HD in HD radio Means Hybrid Digital, not High definition. The quality is worse than a standard FM broadcast, and FAR below the "CD Quality" they claim. The highest bitrate HD radio can transmit is 96 kbit/s or 128 kbit/s, equivalent to a very low quality MP3 file. Is it me or is the "CD quality" misnomer slapped on every lossy compressed digital audio format?

HD (digital) radio in the U.S.A. is compatible with analog, as the digital and analog are broadcast simultaneously. The digital is broadcast on a subcarrier or sideband of the signal, both on AM and FM. The only degradation of the analog signal occurs on AM, where the analog channel is restricted to 5 Khz audio and more interference can be generated to weak adjacent frequency signals from the digital signal.

I have not heard either digital AM or FM to tell how it sounds...however it does not seem to be catching on as I think few receivers are available.

It does allow for different programming on the digital channels and public stations have been using the digital multi-channels to offer such things as continuous classical music and news streams.

hippy crap I say

I have no idea how spending $10-25 as a one-time purchase will be impossible for anyone who has a home and a TV already. You got me there...