[Jeffhs]

The cable company in my area (Time Warner) recently began carrying local TV stations digitally. I asked one of the techs about that the other day; he told me that TW is trying to stay at least one jump ahead of everyone else, to be absolutely sure they are ready when the analog stations go off the air just under 18 months from now. The same technician told me he was planning to keep his 32" analog CRT TV as long as it works; I feel the same way about my two 19" analog CRTs, both of which work very well for their ages (my Zenith Sentry 2 has 12 years on it and works as well as when it was new, as does my RCA CTC-185 19"). As long as these TVs continue to work as well as they do now, I see no reason to get a flat panel HD set. I feel the same way about DVDs as well. Seems a lot of new movies are coming out these days on HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Won't bother me a bit as long as they will play in my current DVD player, or if Netflix still carries standard DVDs.

I did not realize that new TV/DVD systems do not have RF tuners or antenna inputs until I saw a post in this thread which mentioned that fact. (I'm learning a lot in these forums.) I guess we're going to be going digital shortly whether any of us likes it or not--it seems the government's rules about having analog stations go off the air in February 2009 and the current trend towards HD/DVD combination TVs now being manufactured without RF tuners are forcing us into the digital age, in some cases kicking and screaming, but...oh well. As Walter Cronkite used to say at the end of each night's broadcast of the CBS Evening News, that's the way it is.