Posted on 12/02/2005 1:35:43 PM PST by nickcarraway
I don't even have a tv.
Best explanation I've heard on this yet! IOW, it's not a bad idea to pick up one of the bargain TVs out there -- as low as $97 for a 20" analog. It will still work in 2009, one way or the other. It's probably even smarter to wait till this chip is factory installed on the analog sets, although the prices may rise appreciably.
Do I understand it now?
Will the 30 Billion materialize out of thin air, or will it be a hidden tax paid by those using services in the opened up frequencies?
Well, I wish that I understood it before I popped $600 that I don't have for a new digital, HDTV ready TV when my old one died last month. I could have had a larger one for half the price, if I'd settled for the old analog variety! At least I know that my smaller sets will still work in 2009. The new TV is great, however, even without HDTV installed. The cable company doesn't answer their phone, and they will increase my rate a lot if I sign up. So, I'll get along with the service I have.
And I agree with you about the garbage. Even Fox News is getting hard to take. But a brand new Monk debuts tonight! And tomorrow there will be a new show on the lives and journeys of the 11 Disciples, so that will be interesting.
Oh, I think you understand perfectly well. You can be certain that the $30 billion will be absorbed by the subcribers.
Written by someone who either has poor vision or lack of visual discrimination. The highly compressed digital signals that are being sent from cable and satellite providers make pix that are filled with artifacts. Yuck.
A strong analog signal will beat those pix any day. Now a full bandwidth uncompressed HD pix will blow you away, it's so stunning. But what's actually being delivered to homes is lousy.
In what way do you think the requirement that signals be viewable on black and white televisions impaired the technology? While there are certainly other possible encoding methods, the only ones I can think of that wouldn't be compatible with black and white sets would have required too much circuitry to be practical in a consumer-level product in the vacuum-tube era (Betacam splits a color signal into YUV components, then on each scan line it outputs Y at double-speed, followed by U at quad-speed and V at quad-speed; excellent method, but I don't know how to handle the conversion without using an analog shift register or other such buffering device).
By the way, I never understood why color televisions use a frame rate of 29.970Hz. I know it's 3,579,545Hz/227.5/525, but why not use a colorburst of 3,583,125Hz? Or if that would be bad, 3,567,375 (using 226.5 chroma clocks per line)? What's magical about 3,579,545Hz?
Well, I sure can't explain it to you! LOL.
My understanding is that this change is mandated so that the government can re-sell the old analog channels and use them for something else. It is NOT to improve our reception.
Digital signal, 400 channels, living colour, surround sound, and still nothing on...
It's divisible by 17, everyone knows that! Some people!
Yep, Just some things I don't understand, how can the FCC demand that TV sets have digital tuners. Consumers should have a choice. Since the TV is a receiver, and does not broadcast I don't see how they can force people to buy the equipment. How is this Constitutional?
Are you sure? USA's website says January 13.
They did. The regulators, and the market, appears to have settled on 1080i60 (1080 lines of resolution, interlaced, 60 hz - 60 half-frames per second) as the main standard for broadcast. The main reason for using an interlaced broadcast format was due to the limited internal bandwidth of analog tube-based televisions. They could have just as easily settled on 1080p30 (1080 lines, 30 full frames per second) which would have no higher broadcast bandwidth requirements, and would be easier to deal with on the increasingly common fixed-pixel displays (Plasma, LCD, LCD and DLP rear projection, etc). Tubes are basically a dead technology, which although good, will never be seen in any bigger sizes than currently available (34" diagonal for a 16:9 widescreen set). Anyway, it's not the end of the world, but it's not ideal, either.
In the beginning, about 20 years ago, it was being sold to us on the basis of the much higher quality HiDef images.
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