Hold on to your old CRT TVs; HD only by 2007?

[Carmine]

And yes, I have not yet seen anything that looks as good as CRT. It might be an old technology, heavy, and takes up tons of space, but produces the best picture of all the alternate display technologies today. And forget what sellers on ebay say, they are full of crap.

I was at a friend-of-friend house yesterday. The guy had a Sony widescreen set (Less than I year old I think, I was there exactly one year ago, and he had a CRT). I didn't see "WEGA" on the set anywhere, so I think it was a LCD.

OH MY GOD!! WHAT A GARBAGE PICTURE!! The colors were horrible, lots of red bleeding, other colors were weak. Sharpness was non-existant... It looked like I was watching a low-res MPEG. Add to that, he had a dish... Pixelation up the wazoo, and all kinds of frame delays. Sometimes, I felt like I was watching a mechanical TV, the 1/4" sized scan lines were so obvious!

The worst part came when one of the other goobers at the party walked in and said "Wow, that TV sure has a nice picture!" This same guy stuffed a garbage disposal full of chicken bones at last years party, so you can imagine how sharp he is!

Meanwhile, my '77 Zenith Chromacolor daily watcher has such a sharp, realistic picture with such balanced colors and true blacks, that it looks like you could reach into it.. This is with the OTA signal. To think it's being made obsolete by junk such as above, is to be sick!

[Geoff Bourquin]

Since you mention pixelation, I'll take my turn to rant on that. I hate satellite because of it. Especially if there are a lot of things moving in the picture. The system has to throw away so much that it looks awful. You know the look. BAsketball games look like you're watching through a light rain of sand as they players run back and forth. I worked in a small studio as junior engineer (very junior) back in about 1980, and I would have been fired on the spot if I had sent that quality down the line. Same thing with so-called "analog" tvs. Especially projection sets. They may be an analog set, but there's some digital going on on the signal board, and I can spot it a mile away. YUCK!

First time I noticed the loss on satellite was at a customers house in about 1995, and he had CNN on. Reporter outside the fence at the white house, and 2 people walking in the distance, beside the building. They would pop in and out of existence as they passed details of the building. I thought I was loosing my eyesight for a second.

I think I already said something about frame delay, so I wont again. (oops. I just did)

Time to go to work

[Chad Hauris]

The amount of pixellation on satellite seems to vary from channel to channel...most of the channels look pretty good to me though you can notice it if you look for it. Some channels seem to use a higher compression? and motion can look blocky.
For some of us like me the only way to get cable channels is through DBS satellite so I am quite glad it's around even if not perfect.

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by Chad Hauris

The amount of pixellation on satellite seems to vary from channel to channel...most of the channels look pretty good to me though you can notice it if you look for it. Some channels seem to use a higher compression? and motion can look blocky.
For some of us like me the only way to get cable channels is through DBS satellite so I am quite glad it's around even if not perfect.

Some years ago I interviewed for a job at a satellite TV provider, and they mentioned that they give sports channels (football abd basketball games and such) twice the bandwidth of regular channels.

[NowhereMan 1966]

Originally Posted by Carmine

I was at a friend-of-friend house yesterday. The guy had a Sony widescreen set (Less than I year old I think, I was there exactly one year ago, and he had a CRT). I didn't see "WEGA" on the set anywhere, so I think it was a LCD.

OH MY GOD!! WHAT A GARBAGE PICTURE!! The colors were horrible, lots of red bleeding, other colors were weak. Sharpness was non-existant... It looked like I was watching a low-res MPEG. Add to that, he had a dish... Pixelation up the wazoo, and all kinds of frame delays. Sometimes, I felt like I was watching a mechanical TV, the 1/4" sized scan lines were so obvious!

The worst part came when one of the other goobers at the party walked in and said "Wow, that TV sure has a nice picture!" This same guy stuffed a garbage disposal full of chicken bones at last years party, so you can imagine how sharp he is!

Meanwhile, my '77 Zenith Chromacolor daily watcher has such a sharp, realistic picture with such balanced colors and true blacks, that it looks like you could reach into it.. This is with the OTA signal. To think it's being made obsolete by junk such as above, is to be sick!

Ugh. I know what you mean. The best picture I've seen is on our 1982 Zenith System 3 that has been our daily watcher since February of 1983. She's shows her age at rare times when the picture has a red cast to it so I'm looking for parts but when that happens, I let it rest for a 4 days to a week and then it may not act up for a week to almost a year, the time varies. It's usually trouble free for a long time. Heck, IMHO, it rivals many HDTV pics I've seen. Runners up, well, when the convergence is set right, IIRC, our 1970 Zenith (23") Chromacolor had a good picture too. We have a backup 1998 Zenith BPC, probably a Goldstar, it's a 19 incher, I can't complain about the picture but it cannot beat the older Zeniths but for 1990's or 2000 standards, I'll take it.

HDTV mandation that is going on, don't get me started. I think they should have allocated a bloc of UHF channels for it, leave the rest of UHF/VHF for NTSC and let things go from there. Since the old AMPS cellphones are going away, we can have channels 70 thru 83 back, perhaps HDTV should go there.