DTV transition "Soft test" on 11-20-08 in Chicago

[JohnVF]

I don't watch TV over the air, so I have no base for opinion on it. I do, however, work in the television business, as in, I make TV commercials. And all I know is having two standards of broadcast is an expensive pain in the butt on my end. Just this morning I had to watch the same 2 seconds of a commercial over and over because there was some sort of anomaly caused by down-conversion to standard definition from HD in the master tape of a commercial we'd done.

If you are watching HD on an SD set, then yes it probably looks not so great, but don't throw the rest of us to the hounds because we want to see the full (or mostly full) potential of the film that was actually shot. Especially those of us who spend hours and hours of our lives trying to create something and have it look as best we can.

But I only make some of the stuff that is broadcast..I actually don't watch a lot of TV myself, and don't see the harm in having two formats for a bit longer. But it really is a PITA on my end, just a logistical mess. For what it's worth, the HD broadcast on my cable is vastly superior SD on the same channels (I get both).

I just don't get judging a technology when you don't have the proper means to actually see what it's capable of. I don't judge the capability of LP on a BSR changer....no I'm not calling SD sets BSR changers, they're excellent at analogue signal reception, but they don't have the ability to extract what digital TV is all about. The converter box is simply trying make something do what it wasn't designed for. I would think that those converter boxes you unfortunaley are having to buy are down-converting the HD signal to SD...of course that's going to look terrible. it looks terrible when we do it here at work on very very expensive electronics. But digital looks stunning on my TV. Standard looks like I'm looking at the film we shot through gauze.