when will hdtv be in regler people price range

ok i as most you know seldem leave house .so the things i can do is watch tv and use pc i love tv like histroy chanel and discovery.well i want a hdtv i see the one my dad got for 499 but it was a no name one caled dish network its nice but i want cheaper and with digital tuner inside it in 1 year will they be like 200 bucks ?i still love my sony trintron but i guess its 15 years old or older but its picture still rocks but looks bad compared to hdtv

I think HDTV will be standard in 2007 so I'm sure that from 2007 and beyond the prices will start to drop. They are pretty expensive right now /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/broke.gif

yep what is so upseting to me is when my dad got his dish network one he got great deal.lol my step mom got home and said to him get this crud outa my house.so my dad sid i could have it for like 200 i forget price he said but it was like 40 minutes old wasnt even hooked up yet.i said let me think about it. well i hook it up step mom see,s picture and wants to keep it.lolit had great pic but not as nice as his sony but the sony had bad angles ya have to sit in front

Haha, she spoke to soon.

I've never seen HDTV picture, is it really that much better?

to me its like from going from a black and white tv to color .but ya have to view the hdtv chanels to see it id just sit and watch my dads on a hdtv chanle it will be boreing show but the picture blew me away

I hope the prices do come down soon, we will probably get one also when the prices come down. The TV in our living room messed up a few weeks ago, everything looks purple now. I told my Dad to buy a new one he said "Don't you have your own TV in your room?" I told him yes he said "So do I, so forget about the living room TV, only your Mom watches it." LOL.

id like a sony hdtv about 70 inches right in time for football season id put it right in my room i never watch tv in my liveing room.

That would be very nice. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/cool.gif

They have come down a ton already. I see 27" CRT HDTV sets costing for like regular 27" CRT sets cost ten years ago. I bought a new TV not too long ago. Despite being poor these days, I thought about springing $600 bucks or so for a nice CRT HDTV but with the cable company (Comcast), the minimum package plan price to get HDTV was $60 per month and I won't pay it.

The picture can be much better depending on the resolution the station is putting out.

What do you consider a reasonable price? My Mitsubishi WS55809 cost $3000 when I bought it just a few years ago. Now you can get the current model of the same TV for $1399 at BestBuy. That is cheaper than a NON HDTV of the same size was just over a year ago.

The TVs will get cheaper but a good tube projection set can't get but so cheap. At some point the reduction in cost from cheaper electronics slow a lot but the mechanical part of the set like cabinet and display tubes don't drop very much over time.

The discrete pixel sets (LCD, LCOS, and DLP) are still trying to catch up with the picture quality of the tube sets. It will be a while longer before they are as cheap AND as good as the but sets. The main benefit of these sets is that they suffer little from "burn-in". This means you can use them to play games and display computer images with less damage. LCD is more susceptible and DLP is the least.

If the Sony you have is anything like the one my parents have, it's a beautiful TV. Even as old as it is, the picture quality is still pretty darn good, even compaired to an HDTV..

I haven't even seen HDTV in a home where one can get a good idea about it.

Now it looks like we'll be dragged kicking and screaming into it. I can think of one reason TO do it just now...

ESPN2 in HD. I LOVE drag racing!

Hey Joe,

Being forced to go to HD is something that is a bit misunderstood. You don't have to go all the way to HD but just Digital. If the station is broadcasting HD you will not be able to take advantage of the higher resolution but you will be able to convert it to SD (standard definition) which you can display on any current TV. Long term this is a good thing. The digital signal is more efficient so more programming can be sent over the same bandwidth. New TVs will have digital tuners built in instead of the analog tuner they have now. Once they are mass produced the prices should be no more expensive than current analog technology. Some other benefits are much better color rendition, digital audio with 5+ channel surround sound and increased resolution (even if you choose SD). If your broadcaster decides to recompress the signal to add more content the picture can get very bad quickly.

We are lucky here in the Raleigh area that WRAL is broadcasting at a pretty high bitrate. They were the first licence holder in the country allowed to broadcast in full HDTV. They had to borrow equipment from Japan to record the first local content. They have all digital cameras and the ENG (electronic news gathering) is also digital. This isn't a plug for them but just some background info to describe how much stuff has to change. A broadcaster can elect to go simple, buy a new transmitter and some ditigizing equipment and keep the studio analog or go total digital with new cams, switchers, video servers, etc, or something in between.

One thing that we will loose with the migration to DigitalTV is VHF TV stations. They are being forced to convert to UHF. The VHF bandwidth released is being reallocated to other broadcast services. The downside of this is that UHF doesn't travel as far from the broadcast point so the VHF station you receive now may not work when they move to their new channel. Obviously this won't affect Cable or Satellite.

Once you watch your favorite sports event in SDTV you'll be hooked. If you have HDTV it can be a truly amazing experience.

The digital transition is going to be "interesting." Even if a consumer purchased an HD--->SD downconverter for their legacy set, they're going to have trouble pickint things up with a rabbit ears antenna. Many consumers are going to have to go back to rooftop antennas, maybe with an antenna rotor if the digital stations aren't all broadcasting from the same compass bearing. 8-VSB does rather poorly in the presence of multipath interference.

I have thought the same thing about the reception. My personal experience surprised me though. The analog channel for WRAL sufferers a bit from multipath and overall low signal level. It shows up mostly as slight ghosting. I connected my wave form analyzer to the Mits on several of the tuners test points to see for sure and you could see some distortion in the burst too. The HD channel by comparison is rock solid as long as we don't have a temperature inversion. Then it goes to crap.

I'm using a set of Rabbit ears and I have an outdoor antenna and both WRAL transmitters are collocated on the same tower. They installed a set of arms on the top of the tower for the additional antennas so they are also at the same height. Other stations in the area don't have such a good antenna setup for now. That will change in the future though.

Channel 2 in Greensboro/Winston Salem NC (Also CBS) is to the west of me about the same distance as WRAL. Their HD signal is easier to receive than their analog signal as well.

A wildcard in this is reciever quality. My Hughes E86 DirecTV/HDTV reciever didn't have good ears. The HDTiVo by contrast has a fantastic receiver.

I think that most of the issues with reception right now is because broadcasters aren't using full power on the new transmitters or their antenna locations are not optimal. I know at least one Raleigh station is using low power because of antenna placement. Once the VHF stuff gets switched off the UHF antennas will most likely be moved to the prime locations and I'm sure the coverage will greatly improve.

I get my programming via DirecTV Dish only.

All this VHF/UHF stuff is nearly greek to me.

I guess I already know the efect of digital signal?

Just the thought of being forced to do something rubs me the wrong way....

Yea, I know what you mean. I didn't really like it either. I do like the end result though.

I wanted to go HD so the DTV part came along for the ride. If it had been the situation where I was loosing content and I would be forced to buy new stuff to continue watching TV it would feel much different.

Sometimes maybe its for our own good. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

The broadcast signal will be a bit better than DirecTV. They seriously recompress the signal and it has a bit more compression noise in it than the broadcast stuff does. Even DirecTVs HD stuff is a bit over-compressed at times. I watch both here.

If you look at the clarity of a DVD that is what a well done SD DTV signal should look like. So if DVDs look better than your DirecTV signal then broadcast DTV will be an improvement. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/happy14.gif

Well, my wife bought an HDTV monitor a couple of days ago on sale even though I was really going to wait a bit longer. I am surprised by that!

Anyway, now I need a DTV over the air receiver (I am still too cheap for cable /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif). Reading around a bit, and found some good reviews for the Humax HFA100. It was also one of the least expensive at around $200 to $240 dollars.

There was also the Samsung SIR-T451 which look OK at a few tens of dollars more. However, the Humax seemed to have a faster processor and people found the 7-day onscreen program guide easier to use than the Samsung because of this.

Both have Component Video, S-Video, and composite video outputs and should work fine with standard TV sets.

The Samsung has DVI and (if I understand correctly) would need a simple adapter to connect to HDMI.

The Humax has a VGA-RGB output (use your computer monitor to start?) and HDMI (can use adapter to DVI).

Surprisingly, I can't seem to find any local stores that carry any simple DTV over-the-air receivers. They do, sometimes, have a few multi-function units (Satellite-DTV, etc.) but I don't need or want that for now.

So it appears it is off to Internet shopping for me (hence the reason for being up so late).

-Bill

Congrats!! Be sure to post your thoughts when you get it up and running.

Even if you use it for watching DVDs it a great thing.

Chris

[ QUOTE ]
Chris_Medico said:
I think that most of the issues with reception right now is because broadcasters aren't using full power on the new transmitters or their antenna locations are not optimal. I know at least one Raleigh station is using low power because of antenna placement. Once the VHF stuff gets switched off the UHF antennas will most likely be moved to the prime locations and I'm sure the coverage will greatly improve.

[/ QUOTE ]

Good point. Certainly many towers have had to be modified for colocation and that's a less than optimal way to meet the FCC deadline. When Powell relaxed the rules to allow for low power transmitters in order to allow struggling stations to meet the deadline, that made the multipath issues more apparent. I know that the DTV receivers in most current sets are at least at 2nd generation, maybe 2.5 or 3, and they've been working furiously on better on-the-fly equalization and forward error correction algorithms in the receiver front ends. The original gen-1 receivers performed dismally; it's good to see that they're making progress. I think one of the more recent proposals for 8-VSB allows for the data to be stacked differently at the transmitter, producing more robust FEC at the receiver.