I checked into personal analog to digital boxes (same stuff you get from your cable company for a certain charge a month)---------Pricey today–Over $200.
Of course I did not buy a digital box at that ridiculous price. Will wait the lousy 3 years until 2009 when everybody and his brother will have to buy a digital box to make their old analog TV set even work, and when the gubimint will flat out be giving those digital boxes away to poor people, ----------
--------easily subsidized by all the billions of dollars made by the gubmint by selling off the old ENORMOUS analog bandwidth to any and all companies who can do something with that bandwidth.
(bandwidth is precious and very limited and VERY valuable. The old analog is the biggest gold mine ever for our government.)
And in 3 years everybody and his brother will be able to buy digital tuners for $19.95 at Walmart. (or get it free from the gubmint)
I already wear glasses, thank you very much. Are you talking about the type of box that you find advertised in the backs of magazines? Are you sure it wasn’t stolen from a cable company somewhere? :dubious:
I just checked the websites for the major electronics stores. They’ll all be happy to sell me an HDTV tuner (for several hundred dollars) but tuners for “normal” digital TV seem to be completely unavailable, except from the cable companies. In fact, the only retail source for these boxes that I know of are the aforementioned magazine ads. And let’s just say that I prefer to buy my electronics from companies that fly in the daytime.
Maybe in a few years I’ll be able to walk into my local Best Buy and buy an analog-to-digital converter for $20, but I sure can’t do that today. Hell, I couldn’t even do that for $100.
I think you are confusing digital cable TV with digital OTA (over-the-air) TV. They are two completely different things and are not compatible with each other. The ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) standard for digital OTA TV includes both high-definition and standard-definition formats, 18 in all. If you are receiving a broadcast in a high-definition format, and your display device only supports the NTSC (National Television System Committee) standard (U.S. analog color/monochrome), the ATSC receiver will convert the program from high-definition to standard-definition before sending it to your display device.
An ATSC receiver must be able to decode all 18 formats. Any formats not supported by the display device are converted to a format that is supported by the display device. If you are using a typical NTSC television set, everything is converted to the 480i (480 lines, interlaced) format, which is compatible with NTSC.
The prices will probably continue to decline as the deadline approaches and ATSC receivers get produced in larger volumes. In Europe, set-top boxes for DVB-T, the European standard for OTA digital television, have become very affordable now that they are a mass-market product.