Uh, a better image is the only appeal. That’s pretty much the whole point. I mean, what else would there be?
Hey, BC, you seem like a guy who might know: any idea where I can find a good Victrola repair shop?
y’know, back in my day we used to play Doom at 640X480, and we LIKED it that way. You youngsters nowadays with your 800X600 or 1280X1024 - don’t you see that you’re just fooling yourselves? I just can’t see the appeal of this newfangled HI DEF hubbub.
Honestly, it’s like you’re comparing pictures from a first-gen camera phone to the sublime output of a Nikon F5 and asking what advantage one has over the other.
Saying “I can’t afford it” is one thing, but I can’t understand the argument that HDTV isn’t better enough than SDTV to warrant wanting one at all. Unless you were blind.
I’m not a big fan of HDTV either. I’m not even legally blind, so isn’t that weird!
I can see a sharpness difference on pro football games which is nice but the monster expense, multiple formats (1080q? 934i? 700pp?), and general scarcity of HD content make me wish I hadn’t bought a HDTV. It’s simply not ready yet.
I don’t get this at all. The formats aren’t that difficult to figure out. 1080p is best if you can afford it, otherwise any TV that does 720p and 1080i (as almost all do) is just fine. It’s that simple.
Monster expense? You can get a really good HDTV for less than a grand now.
Scarcity of content? Every major network broadcasts in HD now, with at least a couple of dozen other stations (including HBO, Discovery, ESPN, Showtime, PBS, etc) depending on your package. Add to that Blu-ray/HD-DVD for X360/PS3 owners and the fact that every single PS3 and X360 game is in HD. That’s hardly scarce content.
Is it really that simple? Are my 5 HDTV channels I get in 1080p? 720p? 1080i? How about my DVD player. How about HD-DVD or Blu-Ray? How about my PS2, Xbox, and Gamecube?
I have an HDTV and I have no idea at all which of those formats it supports.
I got mine for less than grand. Then I discovered I needed a new DVR. Then I discovered that my cable company wants me to pay more for HDTV channels. Then I discovered I couldn’t get OTA unless I bought a tuner.
It all added up rather fast and I’m still bitter about all the hidden costs of that deal. I’m not sure how much mad money you pile up but a grand is a monster expense to me and I easily passed that on this deal when it was all said and done.
I think you have a bad case of assuming all of America is as civilized as Cali. I get NBC, ABC, and CBS in HD. In the last eight weeks they added Fox HD as well. I’d like ESPN HD but I can’t get that unless I purchase the next tier of cable service and get a bunch of other channels I don’t want for an expense I don’t think justified just for Monday Night Football.
I also don’t have Blu-ray/HD-DVD or a next gen console. Nor am I going to until those ridiculous prices come down. And I wouldn’t get to hook consoles up to the main TV anyway since gaming consoles go downstairs in the den which has a nice big Sony Trinitron SDTV. So yeah, I’ve got almost no content.
I’m not arguing that HD doesn’t look better, I’m saying right now it’s a shitty deal and will probably remain so for a few years
It’s a shitty deal for YOU, based on the specific circumstances you’ve laid out above. Not so much for me (and others like me) who play their games through their primary HDTV. How good a deal it is largely depends on your set-up at home, then.
Oh I’ll agree it’s subjective, it all depends on how much disposable income one has, how good the HDTV service is in one’s area, etc.
I just think that if you compare my situation and yours, mine is a lot closer to the average. So it’s a shitty deal for ME and a lot of other Americans.
http://www.parksassociates.com/press/press_releases/2005/hdtv-1.html
Just the first link I could find, nothing horribly special, but the general point it makes agrees with me. HDTV is right now only penetrating into the most affluent households. I couldn’t find any 2006 stats, it’s still a bit early for that, but the projections I saw indicated less than 50% of households have HDTV right about now and that’s for some very good reasons.
Sounds like your experience, Nick, is a lot like my older son’s. And that has convinced me that HDTV is by no means completely baked.
I got mine almost almost three years ago, and don’t regret it a bit. Even discounting HD channels, which I didn’t get until months after getting the HDTV, I found that even DVDs look spectacularly better than on an SDTV.
Costs back then for adding content were substantially larger than today. The costs will come down, as HD becomes more prevalent, but it does suck that I pay extra for Dish Network HD content. (An aside: the Voom channels Dish offers is worth it, even without the other HD stuff.)
Now, of course, my DLP color wheel is starting to whine, so I’ll probably replace the 720P Samsung with something flatter this year – or at least, with no moving parts. And 1080p. If you get a 1080p unit, it will support everything below it.
The main point of that link is that 2007 is going to be the year in which HDTV really breaks out into the mainstream.
I’ll be watching, as a friend of mine used to say, through heavy lenses.
I do think we will see a big jump in HDTV penetration this year, and probably within 3-5 years we’ll be thinking of SDTV the same way we think about black-and-white today.
Fondly? ;)
You’re thinking of 8-bit :-)
A: If you can’t get OTA without a seperate tuner, you don’t have an HDTV, you have an HD-Ready monitor. The market has gotten better recently about HDTVs being, y’know, HD TVs.
Among other things, this would mean that you could just plug your cable in and get some HD content. (Legally cable companies are required to carry HD broadcast channels unencrypted if they carry them at all; you’d still have to pay them for their box if you wanted HD versions of the actual cable lineup though.)
You don’t have to have a new DVR to work; you just have to have one to work with HD. I don’t get why this would surprise anyone. Your old DVR should still have been able to record everything you wanted.
It will be a long, long time before TV is 100% HD because, well, TV shows old stuff and that old stuff wasn’t shot in HD. Getting upset about that, though, is akin to being upset because TV still shows black and white content at times, and dagnabbit, you have a color set!
I think you have a bad case of assuming all of America is as civilized as Cali. I get NBC, ABC, and CBS in HD. In the last eight weeks they added Fox HD as well. I’d like ESPN HD but I can’t get that unless I purchase the next tier of cable service and get a bunch of other channels I don’t want for an expense I don’t think justified just for Monday Night Football.
Do you curretly get ESPN? If so, I’d write the cable company and complain about them splitting the same channel across different content tiers just because one is a HD version. Also, you should be able to get all your local channels in HD if you’re willing to set up an antenna. It’s paradoxically weird that right now cable companies haven’t done a good job of keeping up with HD. (My cable company carries the big three and I think fox in HD. The local CW station broadcasts an HD signal, but, alas, the cable doesn’t carry it. I guess I’ll have to decide if I’d rather tune HD through the cable or spring the $20 for an amplified internal receiver so I can suck down the OTA stuff when I build my Myth box. Luckily CW doesn’t have any real interesting programming, so it should be a pretty easy decision.)
I’m not arguing that HD doesn’t look better, I’m saying right now it’s a shitty deal and will probably remain so for a few years
It’s not a shitty deal if you’re interested in using any of the features it has. What I’m reading from you is that you got caught up in the hype bandwagon and didn’t do enough research on what’s involved in actually getting HD content. Fair enough, but that doesn’t make it a shitty deal, just a shitty deal for you (and other relatively uninformed consumers).
That will change over the course of this year I suspect. It’s nearly impossible to find a new HDTV without a built in tuner. The prices on the sets are dropping rapidly, and should achieve near parity by the end of this year. Already you can find 30-32" sets (the equivalent of a 27" tube for SD content) in the $400-$600 range during sales. They’re not the best sets in the world, but if you’re watching SD on a 27" tube still, chances are you’re not quite as picky as an HD snob would be. Give them another $100-$200 in downward pricing trend and there’ll be little reaso someone wouldn’t just pick an HDTV incidentally if they decide to get a new TV.
Compound that with the fact that even if you don’t get anything but the three major broadcasts in HD,the quality difference just for those channels is more than enough to justify caring about HD, and hooking up a $50 DVD player through component for 480p output to watch movies you already have effectively doubles the resolution of every DVD anyone might watch compared to SD, and it seems reasonably compelling to me that HD should do quite well in the coming year. (Also there’s the whole 16:9 format, which makes the 32" LCD that’s equivalent to a 27" tube for SD suddenly give you an equivalent picture size to something like a 37" 4:3 CRT tube for anything that’s letterboxed.)
Being an early adopter is always expensive. If you’re frugal, I can’t really fathom why you bothered.
LUDDITE.
Nonsense. Wer’e talking HDTV here. Has to be at least a NeoLuddite. ;)