Completely pro-HD. I find I don’t actually watch that much TV these days, so when I do I want to to be the best TV available.
But there are different levels of quality in HD channels. For instance, I do the tech for a sports bar. We have multiple signal sources for back-up purposes. I can get the TV networks via:
[ol]
[li]C/Ku dish with DVB[/li][li]Over-the-air antenna[/li][li]Cable[/li][li]DirecTV[/li][/ol]
Those are ranked in quality. Even though all of them are technically the same resolution, in order to fit more channels in the same space DirecTV and the local cable company compress the signal more than they should. To minimize compression artifacts, the soften the signal before it gets to the compressor. So the signal that should be the 19.2 Mb/sec signal broadcast over-the-air is reduced to 11 or as little as 9 Mb/sec on cable or DirecTV’s HD “local into local”. And when I compare it to the 35 Mb/sec signal distributed to the stations via C or Ku (the “old” big dishes), no contest.
I’m not interested in HD. I don’t find image resolution improvements to be a compelling enough reason to upgrade, and really there’s nothing wrong with SD at the moment - Digital TV was a huge step up from Analogue, but HD is only an incremental step from SD, and doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t improve the plots or characters any. And if anything, just shows up the cheapness of studio sets and make-up.
Undoubtedly the next TV I get will be HD, but that’s because that’s all that will be available.
An HD image of 1920 x 1080 compared to an SD image of 720 x 480 (maybe) is hardly “incremental”. At least six times the resolution, and that’s not even discussing the dramatically wider color gamut. Non-HD “digital TV” is usually a way to foist compressed, worse quality signals onto an unsuspecting public.
That’s a prime example of how slow the wife and I are to adopt new technology. we were happy for years and years with videotapes. We finally broke down and bought a DVD player four years ago and were amazed at the improvement in picture quality. We still have a few tapes that we watch repeatedly (We ended up giving away about 800 we had in our tape library) and don’t have DVD versions of, and we’re always struck be the poorer picture quality that we used to be happy with. And with letterboxing, we now see even more of the picture!
But we’re not sorry we waited so long to get a DVD player, because it allowed us to get a more advanced model than what came before. We’ve heard that flat-screen TVs have probably bottomed out in price and won’t get much cheaper. Right now, the Bravia model we have our eye on – 32-inch, HDTV compatibe, I THINK it’s the Type X – goes for about 50,000 baht. At the current exchange rate, that’s about US$1500.
That would be contrary to the entire history of the electronics industry. They are at a temporary plateau, but that’s only due to the inherent manufacturing difficulties of plasma and LCD display technologies. The Bravia is an excellent set, but comparable models from other manufacturers cost nearly a third less. Organic LCDs are currently at the same point in their development as the first plasma set I installed, which cost $20,000 and had a terrible, posterized picture with poor contrast ratio. But the OLED technology promises to completely change the marketplace and manufacturing, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a 50" display under $500 inside 5 years.
But don’t let that stop you. Electronics always gets better, faster and cheaper.
I can tell the difference and I don’t care. HD actually looks a little bizarre to me when I watch sports. I think that in shows with close-ups of people we don’t really want or need HD.
But that’s not really noticeable. It’s improved image quality - in essence just a single step. As opposed to the analogue-to-digital leap, which was no reception issues, perfect clarity, widescreen ratio, and digital audio.
Maybe it could be argued there are similarities to the step up, but from my personal viewpoint it’s only a minor one this time round. Plus, here in Australia, there’s great compression on the digital channels.
I have a front projector with a 102" screen. Standard definition television is almost unwatchable. You can see the scan lines and it’s markedly blurrier. 480P DVD looks good enough that you don’t think about the picture much. But HD makes you go, “Wow!”. Watching Planet Earth in HD is glorious. I find myself watching a lot of nature shows, concerts, and other programming like that which I never used to watch on regular TV. But on HD, it’s great. PBS has a series called “Great Museums”, which I thought was pretty damned boring until I watched it on HDTV. There, you’re seeing a museum in the kind of detail that makes you feel like you really are there. It’s fantastic.
You probably can’t see much of a difference if you have a 32" HDTV and you sit 11 feet from it. Your eyes just can’t resolve the difference. But sit the same difference from a 70" HDTV, and if you can’t see the difference you’re blind.
Oh, my stars and garters. I’m definitely not raising my hand. HDTV, especially premium HD channels and Blu-Ray disks, are nothing short of amazing.
I hear tales that sometimes people hook up their HDTVs, but don’t set things up correctly, and either have their cable boxes or satellite receivers set to 480i instead of 1080i or 1080p, or they hook them to the wrong (SD) inputs on their HDTVs. Could that be part of the problem?
I haven’t noticed the difference, but then again, I miss my old black and white with the 15 inch screen. The shows were way better then… If I watch more than 10 minutes of network TV in a week, I’d be astonished; it’s the others in the house that need the idiot box.
My current TV is one I got for a $10 raffle ticket, so once I find a TV for a similar price to replace it, I might consider it. Sadly, you can’t buy an energy-efficient set anymore; they’re all the flat screen LCD or Plasma things that suck electricity like a vampire.
A story from a couple of years ago - I was touring, and they’d booked me into a really chi-chi hotel in Calgary, the kind of place where they usually have dogs to keep people like me away. I was pleasantly surprised to find there was no TV in the room. I said as much backstage, and everyone else was really surprised. One of the other singers asked me to describe the room, and so I talked about the beds, the table, the chairs, the desk, the particularly bleak minimalist painting above the desk, and that was when she said “Check for a wire going into the painting - it’s probably a flat-screen TV, you moron.” Well, she was right.
A static picture doesn’t do it justice. And those pictures aren’t indicative of the difference between standard definition TV and HD - more like DVD vs HD. Standard def TV is much lower resolution than DVD - about 350 lines of resolution instead of 480.
Tell you what - set your monitor to 1024 X 768. See how you like it. Now set it to 640 X 480. That’s roughly the difference between HD and DVD. Now set it to 320 X 240. That’s VHS resolution, roughly. Standard def TV is somewhere between the last two settings.
Personally, I think most of the big-screen plasmas, LCDs, and other slim-line TVs look like crap. The store displays are at best not set up correctly, and at worst the display tech just isn’t that good. As far as I can tell, HD on a 50" plasma gets you a reasonable approximation of a standard SD picture.
When I went HD, I got a flat-screen 32" CRT. It’s unbelievably heavy compared to the slim-lines, but the HD picture is eye-wateringly beautiful. It easily blows away any other TV I’ve seen, and even the Cox guy who delivered my HD cable box and helped me set it up said he’d never seen an image look quite that good.
