If you have one of the newer “digital” televisions, and then want to subscribe to Digital cable, do you still need to have that big ugly decoder box from the cable company, or will the digital television decode the signal?
Why can regular televisions receive regular cable signals with no box, but need that huge stupid box for digital cable? Why can’t the cable companies at least make the box a little smaller or something.
You will still need the box. Based on your cable company, you will be able to get show information onscreen as well as order pay-per-view.
I’d say it depends. I went to Circuit City the other day and the people told me that very few tv’s are actually “digital”. Most are “digital ready” which means they will need two boxes, one for the digital stuff and the other for the tv channels. The ones that are actually “digital” only need one.
The price difference between the two are generally several hundred dollars, from what I’ve observed.
I’ll try to help here, being that I’m currently a broadcast engineer and was once upon a time a cable television technician / installer.
There’s a fair amount of confusion about the terminology involved in “digital television”, “digital cable”, “HDTV”, “DTV” and so on. Most of the clerks and salespeople that I’ve run in to at major national retailers (Circuit City, Best Buy, etc.) only tend to compund the problem by spouting a lot of manufacturer hype and such.
For Digital Cable Television - that is, cable TV that is delivered to you home via a digitally encoded RF signal rather than standard analog RF, you need the converter box because the cable industry and the Consumer Equipment Manufacturing Association have not yet agreed on standards for in-set decoders. You can receive basic cable in an analog system without the converter because almost every TV made now for years has had a cable TV tuner built in - that’s because the cable industry settled on an analog standard years ago. Even with a “cable ready” set, however, in most cable systems you still need a converter box to unscramble pay channels like HBO, etc. There is talk that the cable folks and the set maker may be working on something like a “smart card” to allow a somewhat standardized system of tuners and decoders in future sets. Of course, they promised that for years with the pay channels on analog too…
All of that said, digital cable has virtually nothing to do with “digital television” and has even less to do with “digital ready” TV’s, TV’s labelled “digital” at the store, etc.
Digital Cable is simply a system that delivers the same cable TV programming you get via “old fashioned” cable TV with a digitally encoded RF signal - sometimes delivered via fiber optics to your neighborhood before being turned back in to RF. It’s cleaner and crisper in most cases because the cable system itself (the amplifiers, distribution taps, etc.) can’t degrade the digital signal like it can the analog one. If you live 40 miles away from the cable head end at the end of a long run of wire, your analog cable signal can be quite poor, while digital will be crystal clear.
All of that brings me to the next interesting thing to talk about. Currently, “digtial cable” can’t actually deliver “DTV” - that is, Digital Television being broadcast over the air by TV staions all over the country. The standards for extended definition and high definition TV pictures have not yet been standardized between cable and broadcast - and there’s a huge fight brewing over this now too.
Until standards are actually followed (well, OK - until they’re actually put IN PLACE) then the “digital” word will get thrown around willy-nilly to mean just about anything a cable company or TV manufacturer wants it to mean.
My personal dictionary goes like this:
Digital TV set - A TV set that has a built in digital TV tuner for over the air DTV signals.
Digital ready TV - a TV set that has inputs enabling it to accept signals from a digital TV decoder or cable box
Digital Television (DTV) - the ATSC standard, FCC licensed signal that’s currently coming over the air, free, from a broadcaster near you. HDTV is a subset of DTV - you can broadcast DTV without transmitting HDTV pictures, but you can’t broadcast HDTV without DTV.
OK - I’ve yammered enough.
Next?