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Originally Posted by Pete Deksnis
When I'm using the CT-100 as a daily watcher for local news, occasionally the picture appears HD-like crystal clear. I suspected the use of an HD cam with the video throttled back somewhere and morphed into 480i. Pete
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The NBC television station in Cleveland does that too with all its newscasts (11:30 a.m., 6, 7, 11 p.m.). The station moved into a new studio building a few years ago and retooled its entire production system, with robotic cameras (HD of course) and all-HD digital video recording and storage, not to mention digital switchers and everything else from the studio to the transmitter. The station is northeastern Ohio's first high-definition TV outlet and is an NBC affiliate. Their news and live sports have easily the clearest pictures I have ever seen, even though I still have an analog 4:3 NTSC TV. Even NBC's programs look much sharper and clearer than they used to, but that's understandable since NBC's network feed from New York is HD.
However, if Cleveland's seven other network TV affiliates (5, 8, 19, 25, 43, 55, 61) are broadcasting news or network programming in HD (meaning if they are equipped for HD transmission), I don't know about it yet as they do not announce it locally, even though CBS, ABC and PBS (but not MyTV or The CW) do show a small window in the lower left corner of the screen when the shows are being presented in HD--not unlike the manner in which NBC announced when it was broadcasting shows with stereo sound, "where available", when it began stereo audio transmission 20 years ago. The announcement was in the form of an overlay on the picture at the beginning of each stereo production.
NBC's first shows broadcast over Cleveland's WKYC-TV with stereo sound had problems. I have VHS tapes of one show from NBC's early days of stereo transmission that have an overlay on the picture which states "Audio difficulties. Please stand by." It is difficult or impossible to tell, however, at which end of the circuit the problem existed; it may not have been with the network feed itself after all, but rather with the then-new stereo audio transmission equipment at the Cleveland NBC affiliate.
Stereo television sound is a joke anyway, IMHO, with most sets advertised as having "stereo" audio, even large consoles, having two tiny speakers at either side of the CRT. I have a feeling that the "stereo" feature was and still is just a sales point for table models, especially 25" sets. I once saw a 1980s vintage Zenith System 3 table TV, with a 19" CRT, which had "stereo" sound capability, but the speakers, mounted at the base of the set and positioned to be at either front edge of the CRT, could not have been larger than three inches. Even my RCA CTC185 is in a cabinet that has room for two speakers, although one enclosure space is empty (one can see straight through to the back of the set, looking into the empty grille). My best guess is that this cabinet was used for at least one model of RCA/Thomson's "stereo" televisions as well as the CTC185 mono version.
The only way to get truly good sound from these so-called "stereo" sets is to feed the audio directly into a stereo sound system; most newer so-called stereo TVs have fixed and/or variable audio outputs for just this purpose. The only real advantage to having a TV with stereo audio if you don't want to feed it into your stereo, IMO, is the SAP decoder which is part of all stereo televisions. Many TV programs (some ABC prime-time shows and ABC news in particular) are broadcast in English and Spanish, the latter being on a SAP subchannel.