R.I.P. It's already begun...
 

Washington, D.C. (October 17, 2007) -- Retailer Best Buy today said it has stopped selling analog TVs, taking all remaining sets off its shelves.

:sadwave:

I would have guessed everything analog-only would have been blown out already. I know Best Buy sells returned items on Ebay-maybe their remaining stock of analog-only TVs will go there too?

Costco did that months ago in March.

Check out the new DVD/VCR combo units too. They are all w/o tuners. If you want to record television, you need a cable box or some other sort of outboard tuner.

Now are sets really are ancient history!!!

OK, I will admit I like shopping at CostCo but not for electronics. OH wait, I don't do Best Buy either and I am ashamed to say I helped build 5 or 6 of them here in the Valley. After the 3rd round of the same stupid mistakes on the blueprints, their level of stupidity in this area became kind of mind-numbing. It wasn't rocket -science. All the stores were almost identical and you would have thought that they would get the prints revised after being shown the same money-wasting, time-consuming errors again and again.
Hehe, I don't shop at Wal-Mart either. Sam is pumping far too much into the Chinese economy.
OK, I feel better now.:smoke::smoke::smoke:

I don't get it? What is an analog TV vs digital, and what does it do that a digital TV doesn't?

The current analog signals and frequencies are fixing to go bye-bye. By 2009, those of us with old style sets will have to use a convertor box. It'll be interesting to see how much the local cable companies charge their customers for box rental and whether the rates go up signifigantly or not.

At least there will be converters to allow analog sets to soldier on.

Also, those older sets with adjustable tuners might pick up some interesting things once the frequency range is taken over by other forms of communication.

I think they should keep a few VHF analog stations on the air for emergency broadcast purposes.

I have a feeling pirate television stations will start popping up everywhere. Of course, the FCC will have to hunt them down to keep all the people they sold the bandwidth to happy (I mean you AT&T.)

Only a small piece of bandwidth will be sold, about equal to what was already sold to cell phone companies in the 1980's. There will also be more frequencies used for public-safety radio systems and other purposes. Since digital TV stations work fine on adjacent channels (unlike analog stations, another advantage of ATSC/DTV), we can end up with more stations on the air, many of them with multiple channels, while also reusing part of the old, highest UHF TV spectrum.

After buying a HDTV converter and seeing how well HDTV works when the signal is weak, I agree with MRX37. Some analog broadcasting should continue. Analog continues to convey information, most importantly sound, after digital has failed. This is extemely important in bad weather.

Our local PBS station has the dublicate channels mentioned by Chris, but as of now, it is just a duplicate of their main channel(or blank).

When reception is good digital works fine on my 30+year old TVs (using the converter).

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I also noticed that those dual DVD VCR combos have mono audio on the VCR.

Yes, my cousin just bought one of those $59.99 DVD/VCR units for his church. The stupid thing didn't even have an RF output, let alone a tuner. He had to buy a seperate modulator to use with the TV. I've seen a few higher priced DVD recorder/VCR combos with ATSC tuners. I wonder if anyone makes a stand alone VCR with an ATSC tuner?

Its going to suck when i cant carry my little metal cased sony around anymore.