I have a friend who is so into his HDTV he watches the Discovery Channel just because it’s the only HD channel he gets. This is a guy who probably never heard of the Discovery Channel before Discovery HD and couldn’t possibly care less about science, animals, etc.
I have another friend who was moaning that her cable company doesn’t offer the UFC fights in HD. I’ve seen dozens of UFC fights, probably half in HD and half not, and as og is my witness I cannot tell the fucking difference. My cable company offers them in HD and I’ve never even bothered to browse for which channel they’re on, because I know the regular version is on channel 501.
I also hear lots of people say they went with Xbox360 or PS3 over Wii because Wii doesn’t do HD. I can’t imagine caring or even noticing the difference! I can’t even wrap my mind around the concept.
How’s your vision? My mother can only tell the difference if she looks at one channel and then the same show but in HD. I don’t think it’s a huge deal, but a clearer picture is always better in my opinion.
HDTV is great. You can definitely tell the difference, it’s amazing.
If you don’t notice, you’re either blind, sitting too far away from the TV, or have some kind of equipment problem and aren’t actually getting an HD picture.
If you can’t tell the difference between regular and HD TV either you are blind or are not watching on a set worth watching. I’m not a huge TV viewer but the difference is apparent to most sentient life forms above the level of the petunia.
I don’t go out of my way to intentionally pick the HD channels - mostly because I can’t remember their channel numbers compared to the usual ones - but I can definitely tell the difference between them. I think it’s more important to watch the HD channels if you’re looking at those Discovery/NatGeo wildlife shows like Planet Earth, stuff like that. I don’t necessarily want to see, say, the news in HD and look into the pores of the newscaster.
I have exceptional vision - between 20/15 - 20/10 in both eyes, uncorrected. It’s not an equipment problem because I’ve watched HD in many locations - home, friends’ places, bars, electronic stores, etc. I think it just doesn’t matter enough for me to notice most of the time, but I have made a point to try to tell the difference a few times and I don’t think I could unless the HD and non-HD tvs were right next to each other.
I don’t care about HDTV. It’s flashy, but not particularly realistic (the guy at NBC boggled when I told him that – but it’s true. In HDTV you can clearly see all people in the crowd of a football game on the other side of the field. In real life, you cannot).
I fail to see why this is an improvement and is anything other than a way to sell more TV sets.
If I buy a TV obviously it will be HDTV, but as I have not owned a TV in more than 6 years, it really makes little difference to me. I have much better things to do that sit around watching TV… like, um, posting here.
I can tell the difference, but I don’t really care.
We don’t have cable, so we just use our TV to watch movies and other stuff on DVD. When we recently bought a new TV, we got an HD. Okay, great, maybe it looks better, I don’t really know. I guess I don’t have my head glued to the TV screen enough to notice.
Then my husband bought a PS3 - partly for the games, mostly for the Blu-Ray capability. We’ve converted our Netflix queues to select Blu-Ray whenever available (which isn’t much at this point). Now, watching a Blu-Ray DVD on an HDTV…that I can tell the difference, and yeah it looks pretty cool.
But if I was living alone, would I have made these same choices? Nope, don’t really much care. It’s mostly husband’s thing, and I’m along for the ride.
If and when we replace our 14-year-old Sony Trinitron, which is like the Energizer bunny, still going strong, it will probably be with a Sony Bravia that is equipped for HDTV. We’ve seen in-store demonstrations of a split screen showing the same image regular and HD, and the difference is remarkable.
Huh? That’s incorrect – the Wii, which is only capable of 480p, can output that in widescreen…
And sure, when you do an A - B comparison like that, of course you’re going to see a difference. But when in vacuum (as indeed, most situations would be), I find the distinction to be much more subtle, and find that it doesn’t activly enhance my viewing pleasure at all.
I just bought the Bravia XBR-4, and my wife is enjoying the new picture more than anyone else in the house.
A quick FYI - the split screens I’ve seen in the stores with the Sony TVs have been set up to show the difference between the 60hz & the new 120hz refresh rates. That was what really blew our minds: “You mean the crappier picture on the left is actually in HD?”
The ones we saw were both HD, with the newer refresh technology (which makes the on-screen movements look more realistic) being spotlighted. A better refresh rate makes the picture look better.
Basically, it’s regular LCD HD vs. LCD HD on steroids.
Go get your eyes checked again.
Seriously, I just installed a 52" Sony Bravia XBR along with a HD cable converter. Holy crap is there a difference. Most of my broadcast channels are also available in HD. When the Indy 500 was on, my wife put it on straight broadcast. I thought the picture was great, but I noticed she had it on in standard broadcast, so I had her switch to the HD channel (add 400 to the channel number so 7 becomes 407) Holy crap night and day. Everything became so crisp and clear. It was like finally cleaning your very dirty glasses, everything just looked clearer and sharper.
Yes I can for sure tell the difference. I can’t wait for the next gen Blu-ray machines, I am so going to buy one.
