The other day I was in a supermarket chain looking at a 40" Sony TV playing a SKY satellite promo. There were two pictures in split-screen (left hand was SD, right hand was HD).

I looked close at the SD picture....it had been doctored to look worse than what it actually is. It had been put in soft focus so that your eyes went right to the HD picture. That is a filthy trick to make you buy a HD satellite box and I won't fall for that old gag and any TV engineer looking at that picture would have said exactly the same thing.

You have to give them points for trying I suppose:D

Sounds like they're still up to the same old tricks they pulled back in the old CRT days when the store would misadjust the cheaper TV's in order to convince the customer that he needed to buy the higher priced set.

The other day I was in a supermarket chain looking at a 40" Sony TV playing a SKY satellite promo. There were two pictures in split-screen (left hand was SD, right hand was HD).

I looked close at the SD picture....it had been doctored to look worse than what it actually is. It had been put in soft focus so that your eyes went right to the HD picture. That is a filthy trick to make you buy a HD satellite box and I won't fall for that old gag and any TV engineer looking at that picture would have said exactly the same thing.

You have to give them points for trying I suppose:D

More of Murdock's chicanery. Unlike the U.K, where many thousands of televisions were idled when the 405-line standadrd was abandoned, the switch to HD obsoleted nearly every television in use in America last year :tears:.

Good luck with that HD thing.

Just want to point out here I did not buy the said Sony LCD TV!:no:
It reminds of the time I went into a retailer and they tried to push digital satellite onto me. They kept banging on how digital was so much better than analogue so I told them my analogue SKY satellite picture was just as clear (which did not go down too well).

I am quite happy with my 4:3 analogue CRT Toshiba at the moment, but it will be made useless in 2012 when we switch to digital full-time. Then I will have no choice but to change to a perilous plastic picture frame which I really DON'T want to do.:thumbsdn:

When is it all going to end with differing definitions of picture quality? SD, HD, 3D? The whole damned thing drives you mad! I certainly don't want 3D thank you very much, I wear glasses to watch TV and for driving at the moment and why should I wear them just to get a 3D effect?

KEEP 'EM!

Just want to point out here I did not buy the said Sony LCD TV!:no:
It reminds of the time I went into a retailer and they tried to push digital satellite onto me. They kept banging on how digital was so much better than analogue so I told them my analogue SKY satellite picture was just as clear (which did not go down too well).

I am quite happy with my 4:3 analogue CRT Toshiba at the moment, but it will be made useless in 2012 when we switch to digital full-time. Then I will have no choice but to change to a perilous plastic picture frame which I really DON'T want to do.:thumbsdn:

When is it all going to end with differing definitions of picture quality? SD, HD, 3D? The whole damned thing drives you mad! I certainly don't want 3D thank you very much, I wear glasses to watch TV and for driving at the moment and why should I wear them just to get a 3D effect?

KEEP 'EM!

Are they selling Digital Converter Boxes over in the UK yet? If so, you could just attach that to your CRT TV, and it will work after the end of 2012.

I know in the U.S., cable providers are required to broadcast in digital until at least early 2012. One can only hope that they won't make the switch anytime soon. There are still many people that receive "analog" cable in the U.S. since our digital transition.

The bottom line is, progress is relative. If it works for one person, it may not work for the other. The DTV Transition is a perfect example of this.

Kinda reminds me of a promo I saw a few years back for the first HD presentation of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. They showed a "before" shot of how we used to watch the special in SD-which looked like someone took a pretty clean version, and ran it through the "old movie" filter on their moviemaker software. The picture had digitally added dust, hair, scratches, desaturated color, etc. Of course, the HD was pristine and shiny. I guess my memory was getting bad as I didn't recall Rudolf looking that bad the previous year....

Like I implied before, let those who enjoy digital or HD enjoy digital or HD. Let those who enjoy analog or SD enjoy analog or SD. Don't force digital or HD on anyone who obviously isn't interested.

Like I implied before, let those who enjoy digital or HD enjoy digital or HD. Let those who enjoy analog or SD enjoy analog or SD. Don't force digital or HD on anyone who obviously isn't interested.

Forcing things on us is nearly the case with everything from our country leaders to cell phones

There ain't a HD set that can split between SD and HD so the full image is HD with some chicanery on the SD side. If you did pix-in-pix at home with a HD and SD signal, I suspect the SD is dumbed-up to 720/1080 for viewing.

Yes we do have DTV converter boxes in the UK - been around a good while now. Problem is all the inputs like RCA connectors and scart sockets are all taken up so it would impossible for me to add anything else on the system. My TV has two scart inputs and one set of RCA's.

As much as I love my analogue CRT TV I just can't help thinking that I'm going to have no choice but to buy a new TV - which gets me frustrated.:tears:

And I really hate the way they are making out that SD is bad...when it is not! Do they think we are fooled so easily? Looks to me as if the propaganda machine has been working overtime on this one.

Mr Murdoch! I have seen through your little scheme to push HD!

Well I use only 4:3 with a converter box. And the converter box is set to "zoom" or whatever its called to show a full screen on my tv. And I noticed that all but our PBS station put all the bottom and edge screen information on the screen to 4:3 watchers can see it. To me this suggests that a large number of individuals are using 4:3 sets. I think that when 4:3 users begin to see this corner picture stuff start go go off screen we will know that the majority or watchers are on the 16:9. But anyway I find this little tidbid a nice little nod to the fact that there are many many users of 4:3 sets out there and I bet the stations phones ring loudly when users of 4:3 sets can't see all that little edge of screen cr---p.

just my .02 on the digital stuff...

I see more and more ads for "mobile" tv (think thats what it is) so maybe tradional sit down and watch a whole 30min tv show is going away. Now you can catch snippets of tv while texting, emailing, surfing all whilst driving down a busy street with your garmin telling you when to turn.... Should make all the ADD folks happy.

I see more and more ads for "mobile" tv (think thats what it is) so maybe tradional sit down and watch a whole 30min tv show is going away. Now you can catch snippets of tv while texting, emailing, surfing all whilst driving down a busy street with your garmin telling you when to turn.... Should make all the ADD folks happy.

Very well put indeed!
but Dave dont forget smoking a cigarette and eating a fatty hamburger while doing all the above :drool:

I see more and more ads for "mobile" tv (think thats what it is) so maybe tradional sit down and watch a whole 30min tv show is going away. Now you can catch snippets of tv while texting, emailing, surfing all whilst driving down a busy street with your garmin telling you when to turn.... Should make all the ADD folks happy.

I'm sticking with my used Verizon LG flip-phone that I got for $30 after rebate last year after my crappy Razor2 from September 2007 got exposed to water. I love my current cell phone. It's simple yet complex. It takes pictures, has unlimited texting, and even has news and sports scores. People think it's outdated, which I guess doesn't surprise me since nowadays, EVERYONE "needs" the new Iphone 4 or whatever the hell cell phone companies are trying to push on us.

I also have my original Ipod I got in October 2005. It's an Ipod Mini, and it works great. So why get a new one? Most people don't even need the features that the new Ipods offer anyway.

Are they selling Digital Converter Boxes over in the UK yet? <snip>.

They were selling them there years before us in the states could get them, they call it "Freeview".

It's been a huge success over there, in part because they used DTV to bring viewers dozens of SDTV channels, instead of a handful of HD channels.

Many of the types of commercial-supported channels that are only on cable in the US are on Freeview in the UK.

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ATSC actually beat freeview by several years. The first ATSC broadcast was in 1998, and I assume receivers started to become available in 99. Freeview didn't go on the air until 2002.

Freeview was a continuation of ITV digital which in turn was previously called ONdigital whcih started in 1998. Until recently the original ONdigital boxes would still receive Freeview though compatibility has worsened as more MHEG data was added and more services were moved from 2K to 8K carriers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ONdigital

ATSC actually beat freeview by several years. The first ATSC broadcast was in 1998, and I assume receivers started to become available in 99. Freeview didn't go on the air until 2002.

With a few notable exceptions, Practical ATSC receivers only became available to the US public around 2005. Large screen HD displays were "HD ready monitors" with HD component inputs and either an NTSC tuner or no tuner at all. If someone asked a TV salesman about buying an HDTV tuner, he/she would be told that HD TV was not going to be over-the-air (despite the fact there may have been HD ATSC broadcasts already on the air!).