My Blog In Digital HD

I remember being a teenaged lad and heading to a drugstore on Center Avenue with a bag of television tubes. Remember how you could test your TV tubes on the “Tube Tester” to see which tube was bad? Then buy the replacement right there?

Nowadays, things are easier. Right? If the TV doesn’t work, either shell out big bucks to have a technician look at it or—more likely—just buy new. Our old Sony is sick. It occasionally hacks a load of static, almost like somebody with a bad case of croup. Well then maybe it would be a good time to consider buying one of those high definition big screen models since the digital age is nearly upon us.

You all knew that, didn’t you? By February 17th, 2009, if you don’t have a digital television, or a digital converter, you’ll be seeing a lot of dead air on your set. It’s part of a campaign to get everyone to update their entertainment technology and keep Best Buy and Comcast in the pink.

So I’m going to be ahead of the curve so to speak. But I’m doing my homework. If I’m going to spend upwards of a thousand dollars on a new TV, and some big screen models run several thousand dollars, I’m going to educate myself and be a smart consumer.

That was my plan.

Now high definition, or HD as we educated folks call it, comes in several types. There’s 1080p, 1808i and 720p. Researching further on just what would be best, I came across this in Wikipedia:

The ITU-R Recommendation BT.709 includes 16:9, colorimetry and the 1080i (1,080 actively-interlaced lines of resolution) and the 1080p (1,080 progressively-scanned lines). It also included the 1440 x 1152 HDMAC scanning format. 720p formats were strongly resisted by some ITU-R members and were not standardized there. Both 1920 x 1080 and 1280 x 720p (720 progressively-scanned lines), systems for a range of frame and field rates are also defined by several SMPTE standards.

Lost me there. But then I found out that there’s actually a book titled HD-TV for Dummies. Now we’re talking. Here’s part of what’s there:

“Broadcast HDTV uses a system called 8-VSB (vestigial sideband), while cable usually uses a system called QAM (quadrature amplitute modulation). What’s the difference? What’s important to HDTV viewers is that you need a different kind of HDTV tuner to receive QAM signals than you do to receive 8-VSB (though many TVs include a tuner that can tune into both types of signals)."

Oh-KAY, lost me there too. Uh, maybe there’s an HD-TV book for the super dummy. Or maybe I can just pick out a TV that broadcasts a pretty picture right on the store shelf. So I tried that. One HD-TV I walked by looked the right size, the right price, and had a pretty picture. Just take it home and plug it in, right?

Well, the TV label said, “Inputs: HDMI w. HDCP Inputs – VGA PC Inputs – Multi analog inputs CVBS x 2/S-Video x 2/Component x 2.

Lost me again. But I see that nearly all HD-TVs seem to have these HDMI inputs. Must be the industry standard. So I talked to my local cable operator to make sure my cable system could hook up via these HDMI inputs. They can’t. Not directly, not now. Maybe in 1908. Right now I’d have to rent something extra called a DVR which a technician could hook up for me for a fee. Then there’d be extra charges for the digital channel line-up. Even more if I wanted it in high definition.

Oh, and I would have to purchase the necessary HDMI cable myself. The cable company doesn't supply that.

I predict another golden age of radio.