I’ve had a HD TV for about two years now, but I’ve never been able to receive HD broadcasts. Adelphia has just offered the service and I signed up for it (installation on the 28th).
Is it going to be awesome or will it suck? What can I expect in quality and programming?
Thanks.
How awesome it will be depends on the quality of your TV (many ‘HD compatible’ TV’s really can’t resolve all the detail in an HD image), and how far back you sit from it. One think you’ll find is that if you now sit in the ‘sweet spot’ for your TV, when you put on an HD broadcast you will feel like sitting closer. Because at the same optimal distance for regular TV watching you won’t be able to resolve the detail in the HD image.
The TV is a 40" Sony Tube (KV-40XBR800), and I sit ~6 feet from it.
I just attended an A/V trade show. Lot’s of very big, very nice HD displays.
One was a segmented wall unit about 20 feet wide. Couldn’t see the pixels until I was a foot from it. Wow.
My take on this stuff: If everybody had an 8’ HD screen in their home, they’d never want to leave. We’re going to need a stronger term for “couch potato.”
This is a world where current DVDs are considered 2nd class.
The bandwidth required is impressive. One Panasonic system demo’ed requires 8Mbit for WM9 (ugh*) compressed. You can’t fit too many channels of that on coax. So expect a small number of channels. The broadcast ones probably won’t dazzle at all. (The FCC is just wasting its time there.) But the pay-movie channels should be really good.
*Looks great, unless the camera moves. So sporting events are pretty nice looking, as long as the action doesn’t go anywhere. Yeah, right.
Around here, the local ABC broadcasts some shows (mostly prime-time and sporting events) in HD, while Fox broadcasts in HD all the time. Upgrade to digital cable and we get a couple of “variety” channels that show a lot of IMAX movies, some regular movies, various documentaries, less popular sports (rugby, arena football, etc.) and so on, as well as HD ESPN that’s really poor quality because it’s a 4:3 aspect ratio signal that gets stretched to 16:9 somewhere between the satellite and our cable box. For even more money, we can get HBO, Showtime, and similar channels in HD.
If you’re in a larger market, you’ll probably have more channels available (we can’t get Discovery HD at all, for example), but basically you’re paying for a few channels with an absolutely stunning picture. True HD is broadcast in 5.1 surround sound, too, so if you have the setup for that, it’s icing on the cake.
SportsCenter just started broadcasting in full HD this past week (the set is truly garish in all its HD glory). All the in studio stuff is shown in 16x9 but the highlights and remotes are all in 4x3. Even the stories from the NBA finals were in 4x3 which seems strange because Stuart Scott was being shot by a HD camera.