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Originally Posted by frenchy
...people were ticked off in the old days with picking up color on antennas with ghosting, static, interference, etc., also.
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How right you are frenchy:
We’ve gone from “...ghosting, static, interference, etc.” to HDTV’s equivalent bugs/visualizations.
These bugs/visualizations in my experience progress FROM small-area pixelization TO broad-area pixelization TO broad-area green pixelization TO broad-area green pixelization freezing for a few seconds TO a black screen. All this time the audio rotates through Dolby digital 5.1, Dolby surround matrix, and silence. It’s a mess.
But I’m still able to maintain program continuity by switching to reliable, old-fashioned, soon-to-be-toast, NTSC-channels to watch the rest of the program (in spite of interference from my neighbor’s computers, multipath distortion, and “ghosting, static, interference, etc.”).
Nevertheless, ATSC is a fabulous television system with brilliant engineering behind it.
As I’ve said before, this the same 6-MHz NTSC channel that supported 3-MHz bandwidth video amplifiers in the first color receivers now supports 30-MHz video amplifiers in ATSC receivers.
It reminds me of computer modem advances. In 1983 a Commodore 64 had a 300-baud modem. No grass grew under the feet of design engineers. Now my same 3-kHz phone line supports a ‘slow’ dialup 56k modem. Nearly twenty times the data rate in the same voice-grade line. Ten times the detail in the same 6-MHz channel. Talk about compression.