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HDTV sucks

:: Thursday, February 28th, 2002 @ 12:00:32 pm

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HDTV. What’s the point? Peter was raving about watching the Olympics in HDTV, which I’m sure was very impressive… so I picked up an RCA DTC100 HDTV unit to finally take advantage of my HDTV-capable TV. I actually have felt just the slightest bit of guilt for owning a 1080i capable TV, without ever having seen a 1080i signal on it. :) Anyway, after hooking it up… I’m not very impressed. The picture is shifted to the right on my screen about 2″ (HDTV signals from an XBox work fine, so I’m assuming that it’s this specific RCA unit’s problem), and it turns out that the only worthwhile “local” air broadcast HD signals are being broadcast on channel 61 out of Fresno, which I can’t get. So… having HDTV decoding capabilities in San Francisco just isn’t that exciting, except that PBS occasionally broadcasts HD demos. I just wanted to watch “The Practice” in HD! heh. too bad. :( At least I can return the unit. Maybe I can try HDTV again in a couple of years.

Also, having a TiVO makes it impossible to try to catch shows on at their normal broadcast time. Someone asked me the other day, “What time is [The Family Guy] on?” I replied: “oh. I have no idea!” :)

Two links to share:

- a great kerpal link that Peter sent me
- “Lange Fellowship winner announced” – Berkeleyan article on Wendy

| | link | trackback | Feb 28, 2002 12:00:32
  • yup

    totally agree with you. hdtv in its current state sucks. it was just the technology moving too fast for everyone else. None of the major networks will have hdtv channels for another 5 years or so. the potential is great, but when people rather make money over progress the consumers like us lose out. I spent 10k total on a hdtv, sat dish, and set top box (which was hdtv "READY")…haha it was suck a waste.

  • http://www.geocities.com/choccobo dardi!

    hm. this is precisely the problem that my old HDTV company (teralogic) is facing… the technology is out there, but nobody (not even the networks) is really motivated to hop on the HDTV bandwagon. it’s like a COMPLETE readoption of a standard component in everybody’s houses, not just an add-on technology like VCR’s or PVR’s or DVD’s…

    it seems that there was actually more HDTV broadcast a few years ago when i worked at teralogic… we watched the rams/titans super bowl and the uconn/duke NCAA championship. looked pretty damn sweet, especially on a large tv like yours. during the testing of our chips, local stations actually had HDTV-capable transmission, so we just called them up and asked them to beam out some old HDTV footage of the nagano olympics.

    i went to conventions back in 1999/2000, and HDTV was all the rage. practically every exhibitor worth visiting was showcasing their latest HDTV sets.

    it’ll be a shame if my old company goes down because the world isn’t catching on.

    still too expensive, though, and if somebody buys a small tv, he’ll still have to get an HD downconverter… simply not economical.

    -d

  • http://echeng.com eric

    OK — I fixed the picture shift problem by changing the raster settings in the HDTV box, and I saw a beautiful 1080i picture on PBS. But… it seems that I need a better antenna to get most of the digital channels. grrrr.

  • http://markwang.com/ Mark

    Eric, don’t know if you know about this, but movie studios want new copy protection technologies adopted by manufacturers that could effectively make all HDTV equipment bought before later this year obsolete, in terms of being able to view full-res digital signals from sources like future HD DVDs etc.

    http://www.hometheaterhifi.com.....-2002.html

    Darn them and their insipid "copy protection" schemes…
Echeng.com has been forced upon Can't find file, check '$file'
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