The 19" television in DeBedroom is slowly dying. It was purchased in 1991 and isn’t long for this world. We’ve lost all bottom-screen-tickers and all the actors get chopped off mid-forehead. So, DeHusband has declared that we are buying (each other) a television for Christmas. I have declared that it will between 20" and 30" - It has to fit on one half of a big dresser. Oh, and it has to be CRT.**
Here’s the problem: Do we get a regular TV or an HDTV? Which is better? If we get HDTV (or HD-Ready) do we get 4:3 (normal) or 16:9 (widescreen)? Do the widescreens just stretch normal broadcast or what? We have regular cable but watch a lot of widescreen DVDs. Does it matter? Any help would be greatly appreciated. (Also, what stores are good to buy from?) Thanks!!
** No flat panels because to get the clock at the right height to see while lying in bed, the clock has to sit on the TiVO box which sits on the DVD/VCR that’s on top of the TV. Don’t question it. DeHusband has a long, LONG explanation and frankly I don’t want to hear it again.
There are EDTV’s and HDTV’s and if you got a plasma, they are pretty much the same thing. EDTV is perfect for someone who watches lots of DVDs - they are pretty much designed for DVDs. The wide screen tv’s 16:9 is ideal. Once you see that, you will never go back.
As far as HDTV, I just bought a plasma tv last weekend, got the HD DVR box from my local rip-off Cox Cable and the HDTV certainly does have the “wow” factor. That is the good news. The bad news is that HDTV is still a new technology and there ain’t a whole lot to chose from. Yes, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and PBS all have HD channels, but not all of the shows on that channel are in HD. Showtime, HBO and Starz also has one channel each. The shows that are on HD, well…again, WOW. But is it worth it to buy now? That’s what I meant with the first word - depends.
At some point, all tv’s are going digital. Federal regulation. And at some point, especially now that plasmas are coming down in price big time, more and more people will have HDTV sets and want to see shows in HD. I don’t know if you are old enough to remember the first few shows in color. Pretty much Bonanza and a few football games. Suddenly more and more people bought color sets and the rest is history.
I think your biggest problem is space. Those 16:9 tv’s take quite a bit of space, and what is the point of getting HD if you are looking at a postage stamp size screen. If you settle on a regular tv, be prepared to buy a digital converter box sometime soon as the channels start to convert. On the other hand, if you wait, the prices of the HDTV’s will be coming down quickly.
Sorry if that is all a lot of rambling, but I did so much research before buying my plasma, and getting the HD DVR, I am still dizzy from all the conflicting info out there. At any rate, I really like my system and am looking forward to more HDTV programming.
NYSC broadcasts will cease in 2006, at which point everyone will either need an HDTV set, or a converter box to use their current NTSC sets. So, we’ve got just over a year.
NYSC broadcasts will cease in 2006, at which point all the people who were not aware, cannot afford, or were too cheap to buy a HDTV converter will make a lot of noise about their TVs “suddenly” not working.
NYSC broadcasts will resume in late 2006.
We’ve got an indefinite amount of time.
Make sure you’re getting a HDTV reciever. Some TVs are billed as “HDTV ready”, in which case they can display HDTV content, but have no means of actually acquiring HDTV content on their own. Meaning you have to buy a seperate HDTV reciever to hook up to your “HDTV Ready” television to actually watch HDTV.
The people that bought an “HDTV Ready” televisions and never realized they weren’t watching HDTV will be especially amused when their TVs stop working in 2006.
That said, I was at a restaurant not too long ago and they had a HDTV football game on in a big plasma screen. I’d been skeptical about it for a while, but I was really impressed with the picture. You could see individual blades of grass, whereas normally they’re just playing on a mottled green surface. It had big black bars on either side of the picture… kind of like widescrren letterboxing in reverse, but I think that’s user configurable if you would rather have the picture stretched to fit.
HDTV is here to stay, but it’s still riding the bleeding edge of technology. What’s really driving the demand for HDTV is large screen televisions - most people cannot resolve difference between a 30" HDTV and regular television from a distance of about 10ft - the average distance in a family room. But as TV’s have gotten bigger, and flaws in standard TV images started to get noticed, the demand for HDTV grew.
The problem is that rear projection TV’s are bleemin’ big. They can take up a good chunk of a living room. This, plus their weight and difficulty to move around has limited their market penetration, although that’s growing fast.
As soon as LCD/Plasma technology gets to the point where the average person can afford a big screen even in a small room, sales will explode, and the demand for HDTV content will grow fast.
In high end homes now, about one in ten is being built with a dedicated theater with front projection and 8-10 screens. Trust me, HDTV looks glorious in those rooms. The demand will be there. However, it may not be over the airwaves. I don’t see why studios wouldn’t offer HD versions of shows as downloads some time in the future.
Our little cable system has 78 regular cable channels, which we get. If you get digital cable, thats 35 more “regular” channels with 50 music, and about 100 premium or ppv channels.
They only offer 6 HDTV channels. We’re talking Montgomery here; everthing eventually happens here but it takes a while to get here. Feet will be dragged. So this is looking down the road.
Do you think it would be better to wait until summer to buy a new TV? I read that the prices on LCD TVs are supposed to drop next year. (I read it in Time magazine. Please don’t make me go look it up.)
Gee, and I thought we had a measly selection…at least we have all the major broadcast stations, HBO, Showtime, Max, Starz and two other specialty HD channels. You got squat. They have been advertising www.voom.com big time here…seems you can get the biggest selection of HD shows through them, if you believe their ads.
Regarding TV prices…“regular” tvs are going to be practically given away with a box of Cheerios soon as the digital laws take effect. I pity the poor grandmother all excited about buying a 27" set for $100 and then finding out she is going to have to spend another $100 to get a box to turn those digital signals back to analog to be seen on her set. But I did read the price of plasma tv’s is going down 25% per year, and I think even faster. I bought my 42" plasma at Walmart for $1,995. There was another set that had the same specs and size and it was going for $3,999. I saw a few places now that are advertising 42" plasma sets for $1700 so my guess is, the pricing wars have just begun. Plus, as the demand rises and they start producing more, look for them to break under the $1000 price in about a year or two (just my humble guess).
But all the typing in the world on this thread is not going to help you. Go to your local store where they have real tv’s with real HD connection and see for yourself. Either you will be hooked instantly and sell one or two of your kids to get one, or you will say “eh” and hold off until there is a wider selection and cheaper price. My guess is, if you take hubby along, once he sees it you won’t need to do much arm twisting to have him change his tv-size-rule.
If that’s all they are offering, I would just call them up and ask them when they planned to update their system, and if it wasn’t anytime in the near future, go with a nice standard set.
If you watch a lot of DVD’s, I’d consider getting an HD set. It’ll run you about $300 more than a standard set, but the quality of picture should be much improved. I don’t think I’d necessarily go with a widescreen model, though. By your description, the TV must fit within a specified width, a widescreen TV will just make you get a shorter TV. The overall size of a letterboxed picture will be the same because the width is the same, but full screen pictures will be shorter and stretched to fit.
You are likely to keep this set for a decade or more, so you’ll be paying about $30 more a year to have a significant improvement in picture, and a TV that will support whatever expansion HDTV has over that time. Or… you could save yourselves the extra dough and not get better quality from your DVD viewing and not be able to take advantage of new HDTV channels until you replace the set entirely.
Sam Stone had an excellent point, however, on the viewing distance. Go shopping for your new TV, and make sure to back yourself up away from the display to the point where you’ll be doing most of your viewing. I was shopping for a plasma and at a fair distance I couldn’t distinguish the HDTVs from the EDTVs, so I went with the cheaper one. You might not be able to see a difference in quality when viewing your screen size from the distance you’ll watch from, if so, I’d lean towards conventional TV. I wouldn’t worry either way about converter boxes or HDTV tuners, since you’re on cable, the cable company will provide boxes that work and you have no need to pull broadcasts off the airwaves.
Thanks for all the answers, guys. I took your advice and let DeHusband drag me out to shop for TVs. Little did I know that he had been looking on his own for several months. I’m in trouble. DeHusband has been lured into an infatuation with a big headed, one-eyed girlfriend. Really big headed. 40 inch widescreen big. At least.
So we have moved the “big” TV (27 in) into the bedroom and will be shopping for a really big TV for the Den. We should have saved up enough by August. Hopefully 2005, but we’ll see.
But now I need to give him a wishlist for Christmas. Hmmmm. I think I wanna bookcase.
No way in hades. The government wants that spectrum for other things, which is one of the reasons why they put the deadline in in the first place. With most of the country having cable and satelite coverage, the number of people getting their TV fix over antenna is dwindling too quickly to stop this.
A little other confusion cleared: if you have an “hd-ready” tv, you only need the hd tuner if you want to receive digital signals off of an antenna. If you’re using a digital cable box, it will have the bits in it to get the HD signal to your TV.
Personally, I’m using a combination of a DirecTV HD-receiver and antenna (the DirecTV boxes have HD-tuners built in to them, so it gives me my off-the air channels as well as the satalite channels). I think it’s great. With the Sunday ticket, I get over 10 NFL games a week in high definition (MNF on the antenna, ESPN-HD sunday night game, and a bunch of the sunday afternoon games). I get 5-6 other HD channels off the satelite, 7 over the antenna.
A very big chunk of the network’s prime time schedules are now broadcast in HD. I don’t watch all that much, but when I’m flipping around at night I seldom see 4:3 programs on the big 6 (NBC, CBS, ABC, WB, FOX, UPN). Our local PBS station doesn’t usually show much in HD, instead they’re showing up to 4 different programs at once on different channels.
If you go 16:9, then it will have several options for dealing with 4:3 programs. Simplest is to just put letterboxes on the sides of the pictures. Then there’s usually a straight zoom, where the top and bottom is chopped off and everything else is magnified (this is best where the 4:3 program is being broadcast with letterboxes), then there are a wide array of stretches that never look quite right (the best is probably mitsubishi’s “fish bowl” type stretch, where the middle is left alone and the edges are stretched).
That was true of CRT projection TVs but is no longer the case - as much anyway - with LCD projection and DLP. Our TV is delivered tomorrow, a Zenith 44" LCD projection model, only 14" deep. It’s HDTV ready in that it doens’t have a built in digital tuner but that’s a non-issue for us as we’ll be using a combo HD cable box/DVR with two tuners. 1280x720p native resolution that looks tack sharp with a proper HDTV feed.
We considered EDTV plama for a while but TheLadyLion and I looked at the Zenith together and both agreed that it had a sharper picture than the 852x480 ED resolution and was still several hundred dollars less expensive than the 1024x768 plasma models.
It arrives in the morning so I’ll be able to get things connected after work. I’m really looking forward to testing it with HDTV cable feeds and anamorphic DVDs in progressive scan mode with component video inputs. We’re stepping up from a nine year old 27" Sony which should be a huge improvement at a ten foot distance. I’m sure there is soon to be a price drop in large plasma and LCT flat panels but I leave it to others to try and beat Moore’s law.
Our TV was delivered Monday so I thought I’d give a little report. We got the Zenith E44W46LCD, a 44" LCD projection model. Except for a little glitch that means we can’t use the DVI interface I’m extremely happy. AFAIKT using the component video input doesn’t degrade the image in a way I can detect so I have my cable box and DVD recorder both connected that way. HD cable images look awesome but I can see the same color banding artifacts on gradients I had complained about with my parent’s dish network system. I guess I’ll have to live with that. Detail is astonishing and I’m glad I didn’t settle for a lower resolution set. Anamorphic DVDs looks just as impressive and show detail I didn’t know was possible from NTSC source.
The cable box is a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD, a combo cable box with two tuners and high dev digital recorder. I am very impressed with how seamless the integration is and how functional the whole thing is. I haven’t done a lot of comparison between recorded and live HD images but I have nothing to complain about so far. I haven’t filled up the internal disk yet but I’m going to look into a compatible external drive for extending its capacity. I have a few more tests to make such as archiving programs to my DVD recorder and reconnecting my surround sound system but I am really happy with this setup.
I think I have the same one, so let me know how yours works out. I am having some “glitches” in about 1/3 of the shows I am “taping” (downloading?)…little digital wacko visuals and sometimes the sound goes louder and softer. It is in the recording, not the tv as when I play the scene back, the same glitch and sound fluxes are there. Just want to know if you experience the same - not looking forward to calling the local Cox Communications and being put on hold for an hour.
Also, anyone else notice that when you have your digital televison on in one room, and a regular tv on the same channel in another room, the digital is about a full second behind in picture and sound? Very odd.
Answering all of my own questions above, I had the cable company send someone over. He told me it wasn’t just me, but the entire Las Vegas Valley is having the same problems with the digital broadcasts and the DVR recordings. Said Cox is working on it. So - I guess I get a credit on my next bill and he said they hoped to have the problem figured out by Sunday.
I’ve gotten some small bits of “digital static” on occasion on live HDTV and recordings but nothing that overly concerns me. I need to test a three way splitter tonight as we need to make sure we can run the HD cable box, the NTSC one and our cable modem at once as the originally installer didn’t think we could split down that far.
