Bought a HDTV decoder/DirecTV reciever yesterday. Haven't gotten the dish installed yet, but I mounted a Terk TV55 HD antenna, hooked it up to my projector, and WOW! And everything I saw was obviously digital SD, not HD, and I was still very impressed. Never thought "Friends" could look so good. Can't wait to watch Jay Leno or something that's in HD.
I didn't think HD or SD would be all that much better on an LCD PJ, I was wrong huh? Maybe I should look into improving my sattelite huh?
zardoz
zardoz
A bunch of shows on fox are hd, in 16:9 format... I would kill for hdtv... When i upgrade my projector maybe. What is the resolution for hd 1024 X 1024?
Actually Fox isn't true HD, their "high resolution widescreen" format is 848x480(p). Nonetheless, it's still a leaps and bounds improvement over SD.
I only have an SVGA projector (800x400something watching 16:9 stuff), and HDTV still looks incredible. Something like looking out of a slightly pixelized window. 🙂
Considering the cost of the latest generation tuners is down to around $300-$400 (and the PC-based tuners can be found for over a hundred bucks less) and darn near all network primetime is in some sort of digital hi-res format, not to mention HBO, Showtime, Discovery, HDNet, and very soon ESPN, this is a good time to go HD..
hdtv is still a bit of a mystery to me. if i go pick up a hdtv receiver, can i plug my cable line into it and expect to get hdtv signals? heck, even if the signal is only sd and not hd, just the digital part would be a major improvement. how many digital broadcasts can you actually pick up? should i call my cable company to find out what the broadcast in digital? my roomate actually subscribes to digital tv but only a select number of channels are on the digital package... and definitely none are the major networks.
(H)DTV is no different than analog TV in that you can get it OTA (over the air, standard UHF frequencies), or via cable or satellite. It is however a completely different protocol than SDTV, so no, you can't just plug an analog NTSC (SD) signal into a digital ATSC (HD) decoder.
Most cable/sat providers (Dish, DirecTV, Cox, and Comcast, off the top of my head) do offer HD service though. You'll have to ask your local provider. If they do offer HD service, you'll need an HD decoder box compatible with their service.
The other option is to pick up a good old UHF antenna and an OTA HDTV receiver/decoder. Whatever analog local stations you can pick up with an antenna, you should be able to pick up digitally as well. I think titantv.com has a link somewhere to find out what channels in your local area are doing HDTV. This is about the only way to pick up all the HDTV on the "big 4" networks, since neither the dish providers nor most cable systems have the spare bandwidth to do it for the time being.
So now that I've probably confused you further, I suggest you check out the HDTV forums here for way, way more information on HDTV than you ever wanted to know. 🙂
Most cable/sat providers (Dish, DirecTV, Cox, and Comcast, off the top of my head) do offer HD service though. You'll have to ask your local provider. If they do offer HD service, you'll need an HD decoder box compatible with their service.
The other option is to pick up a good old UHF antenna and an OTA HDTV receiver/decoder. Whatever analog local stations you can pick up with an antenna, you should be able to pick up digitally as well. I think titantv.com has a link somewhere to find out what channels in your local area are doing HDTV. This is about the only way to pick up all the HDTV on the "big 4" networks, since neither the dish providers nor most cable systems have the spare bandwidth to do it for the time being.
So now that I've probably confused you further, I suggest you check out the HDTV forums here for way, way more information on HDTV than you ever wanted to know. 🙂
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