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Working at the shop I talk to a LOT of college aged kids, know what I've found? Frankly TV is The Lawrence Welk Show, something old folks liked that the kids honestly don't understand and don't want.

Except the stats show the exact opposite of your anecdotal experience. Younger people are MORE likely to use an OTA antenna than older people. Poor people are always disproportionately represented, but they're absolutely not the only group where OTA viewership is growing.

"The number of households relying on OTA reception only is also growing, [...] Growth is especially strong amongst younger households,"

"One in five young households never bothered to get a TV subscription to begin with."

"Also, 28 percent of all households with a head of household under the age of 35 use an antenna instead of a pay-TV subscription."

http://broadcastengineering.co...

No doubt internet streaming contributes to the trend, but it's mostly a lot of OTA antennas (and DVRs). The economics of broadcast are so much better than unicast, not to mention the increasing prices for high-speed internet access.

They could have chosen a digital broadcast TV standard that was backwards-compatible with the older signalling system. It existed. It was one of the choices.

ATSC is digital. NTSC was analog. There is no way to have an analog-compatible high-definition digital broadcast standard, without just having two channels operating side-by-side, which would be the worst of both worlds.

Instead they went with a brand-new protocol, that made all old TVs obsolete, unless they bought an expensive converter box and antenna.

Converter boxes were all only $10-15 after the NTIA coupons every household got two of. And these days, you can get a digital converter with USB, photo/audio/video (MPEG-4, H.264, WMV, etc.) playback, and full DVR/PVR functions, for all of $30, like the EMatic AT103B from Walmart:

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Emat...

You certainly don't need a new antenna. A select few people may have lost a few channels, but that was really unrelated to the digital switchover, and just an opportune moment for broadcasters to save some money.

The result? Relatively few people in the U.S. watch broadcast TV anymore.

The number of OTA viewers has GROWN significantly after the switch to digital, and cable companies are seeing declining subscriber counts as a result. Many of those who could get static-filled analog TV broadcasts didn't want them, and resorted to the better picture quality of cable or satellite. These days, OTA is now the BEST picture you can get, and cable and satellite are the inferior choices, which also cost obscene amounts of money for very little value-add.

The most recent reports conclude: "OTA television is growing in importance to more Americans as percentage of TV households whose only source of TV is received off-air has climbed to nearly 20 percent"

And the biggest percentage of those cable TV subscribers are old baby boomers, who will simply die off in the coming years, and shift the numbers increasingly towards OTA:

"The research also found that younger households are more likely to be OTA-only. Among households headed by someone 18 to 34 years of age, 28 percent are broadcast-only"

http://broadcastengineering.co...

If you want to kill off a technology, abandoning backward compatibility is a great way to do it.

Maintaining TOO MUCH backwards compatibility is a great way undermine NEW technologies, too. If you look at something like Ethernet, which seems to have an unbroken chain of compatibility, in fact they only maintain compatibility a single generation back, and discard what came further before. Notice that the GigE cards don't come with AUI or BNC connectors? Notice that there are no GigE hubs? That GigE doesn't work over the CAT-3 cabling that was installed en-mass way back when? And in the future, CAT-5 will go out the window, too.

Today, with 802.11ac available, it's long past time to eliminate 802.11b compatibility, making that 802.11g equipment faster.

I was dissapointed in the audio specs. A mic and a DSP/Noise filter. I was hoping for a phased array of microphones that could be focusted on a single sound source to isolate a single speaker in a crowd.

Somewhat like they use in pro sports but on a smaller scale.

http://broadcastengineering.com/audio/new-microphone-audioscope-1022
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19541-audio-zoom-picks-out-lone-voice-in-the-crowd.html

Boxee and Comcast made a deal to enable IPTV for their product(s). We dont know all the details of the deal but what if storage isnt on boxee servers but is instead stored out on comcast for comcast subscribers. http://broadcastengineering.com/blog/comcast-makes-encryption-deal-internet-tv-developer/

That's in the context of a particular piece of hardware which happens to produce an H.264 stream. The Skype blog post cited by Wikipedia doesn't say anything about H.264 being used preferentially for full high definition video calls and doesn't imply that a web cam which produces a full high definition VP8 stream wouldn't be supported. You're reading too much into it.

Hrm, I was relying on that wikipedia entry for my info so I'll concede that that I may be wrong on that point. It doesn't change the fact however that Skype does now support h.264 and webcams are implementing h.264 in hardware in order to prevent burdening the CPU like the other codecs do. Further more it seems Skype had to go h.264 in order to support a variety of portable and embedded devices :

"Skype’s decision to adopt H.264 was made because it has become the de facto codec for video delivery across a wide range of devices. Due to hardware acceleration built into low-powered devices such as TVs, Blu-ray players and mobile handsets, video publishers have increasingly turned to H.264 for video playback."

In 2010 Nielsen said that only 9% of American households received only terrestrial broadcast TV (ie. not cable or satellite). That number might have increased as the recession has made dropping paid services in favor of free (plus a possible digital converter/antenna) terrestrial broadcasts, but not much.

However, I would expect that a much larger proportion of that tenth of American households is in reach of an alertable emergency, like flood or tornado. More who don't work, so are isolated at home, need it. More children on average in those households, so more Americans. So I wouldn't be surprised if over 25-30% of Americans who needs these alerts can get them only over broadcast TV. I also expect they watch more TV on average than Americans overall, especially without the Internet.

And because people in that condition have a higher chance of being stupid losers, who watch TV all day in their trailer park surrounded by more children than they can afford to feed or relocate from an emergency. But those people still need the public to warn them of emergencies.

Real multiplayer gaming is done over the internet anyway.

This is true in cases of only one gamer in the household, but as video gaming becomes more popular, it becomes fun for the whole family.

When you want someone sitting next to you cussing about the way you play, just play the console version on your PC.

PCs can emulate only discontinued consoles and the Wii. Why don't more PC native games have modes designed for an HDTV and gamepads, especially since PCs can easily use the same gamepads as an Xbox 360?

Assuming you have money for a big enough screen

HDTVs like my Vizio VX32L can accept VGA and DVI signals from PCs. Six months ago, HDTV penetration in the United States was up to 56 percent. So yes, a lot of people do "have money for a big enough screen".

Well, Obama just mentioned in SOTU that he wants to expand 4G out to 98% of the U.S. He'll be giving a speech on Thursday to plug it.

If found guilty, I hope the fines go well beyond damages and are punitive enough to give CEOs pause before repeating.

Sony in particular--it was only 2+ years since their fines part for collusion for price fixing for Beta-type tapes.

http://broadcastengineering.com/news/eu-fines-betacom-1126/

Sony got an extra dose of fines in that one for obstructing justice with employees shredding documents. However, fines still weren't enough there since Oops they did it again. Most large corporations are amoral, they respond only to the shareholders. If guilty this time, need a heavy enough fine to be a real deterrent when the CEO is facing angry shareholders looking at the reason why there was such a loss that year.

"No, they don't. The part nobody seems to understand is that it's all all taxpayer dollars. Consumer tax payer dollars"

The part you don't understand is that the FCC makes a /lot/ of money from fees and fines, and very much less in taxes since the Reagan era.

For instance, you do not want to know what kind of fine you'll get if you're running a kilowatt linear amp in the Citizens Band frequencies. Last I looked, it's $8K and that was 10 years ago. It's likely more now.

So how much does the FCC get in taxpayer money in relation to its overall budget?

Let's look.

http://broadcastengineering.com/RF/Kevin-Martin-FCC-20050506/ (It's from 2005, but it's close enough for 2 digit precision)

"Newly appointed FCC Chairman Kevin Martin went before the House Appropriations Committee April 26 to ask for authority to spend a little more than $304 million in fiscal year 2006.

Of the $304 million, all but about $4.8 million will come from regulatory fees, Martin proposed."

So what was that you were saying?

Actually no promises were needed in Denver. A Federal law was passed to say they could put the tower on Lookout Mountain no matter what anyone said:

http://broadcastengineering.com/RF/law-clears-obstacles-0104/

P.S.

Now imagine the same thing if a Whitespace Device starts broadcasting on channel 18 (directly next to WPLH-17). You won't just get noise. You'll get digital breakup of the television's video, like so: http://broadcastengineering.com/hdtv/video-show-congress-white-space-interference-1014/

Here's a video produced by the National Association of Broadcasters that shows what happens when somebody uses a "white space" gadget to connect to the internet on-top of an existing station:

http://broadcastengineering.com/hdtv/video-show-congress-white-space-interference-1014/

I hope Congress does the right thing and turns-down the use of these devices on channels 2-to-51. I don't want my television viewing to devolve to the poor interference displayed in the video.

Is this NAB video any less fraudulent than the studio-produced audio CD it distributed to Congress in 2000 to "prove" that interference would be caused by community low-power FM radio stations to its members' stations?

That NAB fraud was so successful, they're apparently trying it again:
http://www.allbusiness.com/services/motion-pictures/4835673-1.html

-bernieS

Here's a video produced by the National Association of Broadcasters that shows what happens when somebody uses a "white space" gadget to connect to the internet on-top of an existing station:

http://broadcastengineering.com/hdtv/video-show-congress-white-space-interference-1014/

I hope Congress does the right thing and turns-down the use of these devices on channels 2-to-51. I don't want my television viewing to devolve to the poor interference displayed in the video.

...but at an average of 6 hours of viewing a day...

Apparently you are off by about 50%. But Four hours a day is still a lot.

In the US only old people watch TV anyway.;-)

You can keep saying whatever you want, and believing that there's some great conspiracy. These devices have failed to detect mics and TV stations in every test so far. Cold fusion has a better record.

Fortunately these tests are open to the public.

Don't get me wrong. I love the idea of these devices (and of completely free and open networking). The reality is that, so far, implementations have failed basic tests. We'll get there, but let's not just decide that we're there because we want it really bad. My ideal is an open, wireless, buy-only-a-device-to-play mesh network, and it may be something we can do in the future. Devices that can detect and dodge interference in RF are definitely the first step.

Tests rigged? That's not what I get from the director of advanced development for Shure Brothers Microphones, Edgar Reihl.

He was there for the tests last month.

See this article in Broadcast Engineering magazine:

http://broadcastengineering.com/hdtv/reihl-sheds-light-wsd-tests20080819/index.html

For the several years I've been using an el gato http://www.elgato.com/eyeTV HTDV gizmo to record over-the-air HD content to disk, and then (lacking any means of directly driving the Hitachi HDTV from the server) burning the programs to DVD for playback on the better screen via the set-top DVD player. Packing HD content onto a standard DVD is a learning experience in itself, as it's all to easy to put more bandwidth into the DVD than the player will handle, with subsequent artifacts and other nonsense.

So when the AppleTV was announced, I leaped at it, and have been getting accustomed to the device over the past few weeks. My goal has been (and is) to use the server in the next room as a media server, streaming content to the Apple TV for playback on the Hitachi plasma HDTV. In this, my intent has been to put DVDs and recorded broadcast content on the server, taking advantage of the rapid decline in cost of hard drives.

I've had most success using Handbrake to rip DVDs to bits-on-a-disk in MP4 form, then using VisualHub to fine-tune the conversion to AppleTV format, transcoding to H.264 and 1280x720, 24 fps for DVDs. For broadcast content, I go directly from eyeTV to an AppleTV-compatible format (960x540, 29.97 fps, single-pass H.264). The AppleTV-formatted content is then added to iTunes and streamed to the AppleTV via 802.11n wifi. I find that streaming gives me better results than syncing, especially if the content has longer playback times. In all cases, I maintain the max playback bandwidth at close to 5 Mbps, the published limits of the AppleTV.

The reason I go for the 960x540 format for broadcast content is that it's gonna end up that way anyhow, due to the content provider's (that would be the studio, not Apple) inclusion of the ICT http://broadcastengineering.com/mag/broadcasting_c pr_redefined/(Image Constraint Tag) in the video stream, so that higher-resolution video thusly tagged gets knocked back to 960x540. If you just let QuickTime do the conversion via their AppleTV menu choice in QuickTime Pro, you also get the bandwidth throttled back to 4 Mbps.

The end result is that the viewing experience is very close to set-top DVD playback, but less than over-the-air HDTV. All in all, a "good enough" experience, especially for only $320 (including the HDMI-to-HDMI cabling).

In my initial testing of the device, I predicted that there would be a chasm between two groups of users -- those who love the AppleTV, and see it as a significant advance in bringing computer-controlled TVs into the living room, vs those who see it as an abject failure. The difference between these two camps is largely one born out of expectations. The people who hate it wanted effortless 1080p quality video, a built-in DVD player and HD receiver, and were shocked to discover that it actually was a little less than Steve Jobs pitched it to be, instead of a lot more. Maybe a second- or third-generation model will come closer to their dreams, but if so, it will be because the studios have loosened up in what they will permit such a device to do, and because the internet providers have boosted the available bandwidth to permit downloading of multi-gigabyte files in a reasonable time (hint: an hour of HD MPEG2 video takes around 5 GB to store on the hard drive).

Today's limitations on what can be done with connecting the internet to HDTV are constrained mostly by the available bandwidth and the studios' restrictions on how much fidelity they allow in downloaded content. When the Xbox HD content-via-the-web becomes available, I expect that it will be similarly hobbled.

So long as you don't have over-the-top expectations, y

analog TV, radio, HAM, CB, and other ancient/antiquated technologies

You have no idea how much the airwaves actually are used by mission critical systems, do you? Wireless is the future, not the past. Analog TV is still in full force in many areas where cable still isn't available (including my childhood home). HAM and CB are far from antiquated and are still used in full force. I'm sorry if you don't use them. HAM's pay for licenses which goes to the FCC and CB's are low power transmitters operating on a very small frequency range.

The point is there needs to be designated ranges, otherwise you will have Joe Ham who will stick his 1KW transmitter too close to the operating range of something important - say the transponder of a cell tower (900 MHz) and disrupt cell service. For example. There needs to be regulated bandwidths.

You have it all wrong anyways - they are actually generating money for the government. About 1 penny of your taxes goes to fund them, but then they turn around and generate multi-billion dollars of revenue. reference. Their budget for 2006 is $304M, all but $4.8M comes from regulatory fees. And they generate $26.8B for uncle Sam through auctioning off freed up frequencies.

you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

you can't get a 4x reduction from 1080i without sacrificing something.

i've been encoding video for ~10 years now, i've extensively used all the various codecs. mpeg4 is great for low bitrate PC generated video (which is what it was designed for), but it is not significantly better than mpeg2 to get the miracle compression you attribute to it. mpeg4 scales down very well (eg think streaming video over dialups) but it does not scale up signficantly better than mpeg2.

i know you think your 4x reduced mpeg4 rips look "good" on a pc monitor, but they look horrible blown up on a bigscreen. artifacting all over the place. it's simple physics -- you can't generate detail from missing bits, mpeg4 is not so advanced beyond mpeg2 that it can pull off compression miracles.

mpeg4 in theory can get very high compression rates through object based scene analysis (again, PC generated video), but nobody does this yet. in reality its just another simple DCT motion vector scheme.

don't believe me? try this analysis by an mpeg expert.

"There is real incentive to make something efficient from a business standpoint, because your customers see the real cost of the service in their bill every month."

Yeah right, tell me another one. You obviously don't pay a cable or satellite TV bill every month for a basic package. In case you haven't noticed they are routinely jacking up rates faster than inflation by a substantial amount, and the quality of the channels and programming they provide is either staying the same or getting worse. They claim they add more channel but neglect to point out most of the channels they add are garbage.

Since 1996 when rates were deregulated they've gone up 50%, three times inflation, 150 channels and there is still nothing on worth watching most of the time.

OK so you are paying maybe $40 a month for this fine service. We are talking basic cable. Pretty much every channel you get on basic is laden with commercials so you get to pay twice, both for the service and you still have to watch programs laden with ads.

Ever watch TV late in the evening or early morning. Nearly every channel is running infomericals all night not to mention most packages carry a half dozen shopping channels which are basicly infomercials 24x7.

You want efficient cable/satellite then make them sell you each channel individually and if you don't want 3/4 of the channels they provide you pay 1/4 of the price you do now. John McCain among others have tried to push this in congress and the TV/Satellite companies kill it in short order.

"but since it's in taxes, you never actually know this"

Bah again. Any city worth a plug nickel will have the costs of the service broken out in black and white in its budget. Wouldn't take much more for them to provide usage statistics on numbers of users and bandwidth used.

"And, things will never get better, since commercial providers can't compete against "free". Everyone loses."

Well actually no. The only losers are private companies that want to rake in a lot of money on internet service. Internet access IS a lot more like essential infrastructure today. Any kid in school needs it for research and if they don't have it at home they are forced to libraries or to do without. Most cities do provide internet service through libraries at taxpayer expense already, you are just saving people from having to go to the library and queue up to get it, assuming you can swing a second hand computer.

If you make each household pay monthly the affluent get it, the poor don't and you just reinforce the digital divide. If it is done through taxes everyone has equal access.

Wireless access points are cheap, there is so much dark fiber sitting around bandwidth is also cheap. Its key you don't have to run something in to every home. Just setup evenly spaced access points. It is totally rationale and efficient for cities to provide this as a public service.

Cable and DSL will never be able to compete against wireless, free or not, so they have a lot to fear. They have to run copper or fiber in to every home, send crews around to hook, unhook and repair every home. They have to spend a small fortune mailing out bills, cashing checks and dealing with deadbeats. The can't beat public wireless on efficiency, how its paid for.

"There is real incentive to make something efficient from a business standpoint, because your customers see the real cost of the service in their bill every month."

Yeah right, tell me another one. You obviously don't pay a cable or satellite TV bill every month for a basic package. In case you haven't noticed they are routinely jacking up rates faster than inflation by a substantial amount, and the quality of the channels and programming they provide is either staying the same or getting worse. They claim they add more channel but neglect to point out most of the channels they add are garbage.

Since 1996 when rates were deregulated they've gone up 50%, three times inflation, 150 channels and there is still nothing on worth watching most of the time.

OK so you are paying maybe $40 a month for this fine service. We are talking basic cable. Pretty much every channel you get on basic is laden with commercials so you get to pay twice, both for the service and you still have to watch programs laden with ads.

Ever watch TV late in the evening or early morning. Nearly every channel is running infomericals all night not to mention most packages carry a half dozen shopping channels which are basicly infomercials 24x7.

You want efficient cable/satellite then make them sell you each channel individually and if you don't want 3/4 of the channels they provide you pay 1/4 of the price you do now. John McCain among others have tried to push this in congress and the TV/Satellite companies kill it in short order.

"but since it's in taxes, you never actually know this"

Bah again. Any city worth a plug nickel will have the costs of the service broken out in black and white in its budget. Wouldn't take much more for them to provide usage statistics on numbers of users and bandwidth used.

"And, things will never get better, since commercial providers can't compete against "free". Everyone loses."

Well actually no. The only losers are private companies that want to rake in a lot of money on internet service. Internet access IS a lot more like essential infrastructure today. Any kid in school needs it for research and if they don't have it at home they are forced to libraries or to do without. Most cities do provide internet service through libraries at taxpayer expense already, you are just saving people from having to go to the library and queue up to get it, assuming you can swing a second hand computer.

If you make each household pay monthly the affluent get it, the poor don't and you just reinforce the digital divide. If it is done through taxes everyone has equal access.

Wireless access points are cheap, there is so much dark fiber sitting around bandwidth is also cheap. Its key you don't have to run something in to every home. Just setup evenly spaced access points. It is totally rationale and efficient for cities to provide this as a public service.

Cable and DSL will never be able to compete against wireless, free or not, so they have a lot to fear. They have to run copper or fiber in to every home, send crews around to hook, unhook and repair every home. They have to spend a small fortune mailing out bills, cashing checks and dealing with deadbeats. The can't beat public wireless on efficiency, how its paid for.

Actually, it's the "year of HD" , specifically editing HD on your computer ( you said it right the first time, I suspect you meant to type HD and your brain flipped you to DV instead ) ... HD of course really will need Firewire, will benefit greatly from Firewire800, and definitely would hurt to transfer over USB2.0... so you may have a point, though every Mac I know about has two Firewire ports anyway... so mostly, it's a cost cutting measure, still... that and a nod to all the windows users with USB2.0 and no Firewire.

It's interesting to note that Firewire cards for PCs are super-cheap ( I found one that's 14 bucks new ), so the reason that few PC folks have Firewire points to the truth that few people are interested in opening their cases and using their extra PCI slots. They also don't see reason to use Firewire, since they're not editing video and can get USB2.0 drives ( and don't use external drives anyway ), but... interesting, anyway.

I went and researched this a bit, and found the following links useful:

http://engadget.com/entry/5180876097686388/ http://www.audioholics.com/techtips/specsformats/C ableCARDprimer.php
http://broadcastengineering.com/news/broadcasting_ cable_era_begins/

in the UK we are all digital (DTV) and the push is big, in fact they (the gov) reckon they will switch off the analog transmitters in 2012 in which case all those handheld tv's, tv tuners will all be static monitors or doorstops

i guess these manufacturers dont quite get that TV is evolving without them, let me know when i can access my TV guide and have multiple camera angles with one of these things and maybe they might get some interest

The regulatory costs of forcing spectrum to emulate property are enormous

I'm not a fan of regulation, and the article makes good points, and it's true that the budget of the FCC is about $280 million/year. However, compared to the total annual income of the radio, television, and other industries that use spectrum, is the FCC's budget really that large a percentage?

HD DVD are not available yet.... but, they're talking about them already. Check out stories on Blu-ray, and MS HD DVD Codec or DVD Forum approves new DVD standard

Also, although the theoretical limit of human hearing is 20kHz, a sufficiently high pitched sound that is not a sine wave will have many harmonics that are above the 20 (or 22.05) kHx limit - these do color the sound, and their unnatural filtering contributes to the often-commented harshness of digital.

They do not colour the sound. They are proven by repeated experiment to be inaudible. Playing two frequencies, one audible and one inaudible, is indistinguishable from playing the single audible frequency. This is the fundamental theory that drives all modern audio compression.

All periodic signals are combinations of sine waves. A square wave has harmonics that continue into infinity, but only the frequencies below ~20kHz are audible. The output from a CD player is filtered through a 20kHz bandpass to remove aliasing frequencies. The square wave is no longer square but it still sounds like a square wave!

I agree with both your points. Surround sound is far more important than 24/96 and CD bandwidth is not perfect. But I have to disagree with these repeated claims that inaudible frequencies make any difference to the audio. Perhaps they make a difference in other ways - eg, maybe the body can detect subsonic and supersonic frequencies by touch - but it makes no difference to the audio.

Not only do they want to tax the movement of money, they want to tax anything that moves. The city of Los Angeles wanted to tax satellites in space a property tax because they cost hundreds of millions of dollars and, for now they are not taxed. The city was looking at the satellites as about $300,000 in lost revinue. Thankfully that idea was turned down.

and here's when la county tried to charge property taxes for satellites overhead

Here's a clue to the tax problem in california, they could try controlling their borders better, allow lawful citizens to live and work there, kick out illegal criminals. Also stop being a clueless nanny state in the legislature. Might save a few bucks that way. Just a thought.

Why did virtually every country in the world rejected ATSC if it's so good? Multipath kills ATSC. It doesn't matter how much power you throw at it.

Television magazines editorialized against ATSC. TV Broadcast Magazine, in a January 2001 editorial said, "Digital broadcasting in the U.S. appears to have received the death penalty." Broadcast Engineering, in August, 2000, said, Kill The Beast Now!

What's wrong with this picture? I live in a downtown apartment and will likely NEVER be able to receive ATSC (cable doesn't need the overhead of ATSC). The UK delivers 30 free digital channels with a $99 box.

Demonstrations show COFDM/DVB-T working inside buses. ATSC can't. Mobile data reception is impossible. I wanted a webtable. Now I don't see the point.

It was simple corruption. ATSC wanted royalties.

Why did virtually every country in the world rejected ATSC if it's so good? Multipath kills ATSC. It doesn't matter how much power you throw at it.

Television magazines editorialized against ATSC. TV Broadcast Magazine, in a January 2001 editorial said, "Digital broadcasting in the U.S. appears to have received the death penalty." Broadcast Engineering, in August, 2000, said, Kill The Beast Now!

What's wrong with this picture? I live in a downtown apartment and will likely NEVER be able to receive ATSC (cable doesn't need the overhead of ATSC). The UK delivers 30 free digital channels with a $99 box.

Demonstrations show COFDM/DVB-T working inside buses. ATSC can't. Mobile data reception is impossible. I wanted a webtable. Now I don't see the point.

It was simple corruption. ATSC wanted royalties.

This technology is similiar. Tape had a 50 year head start over digital recording, and look how long it took for digital to take over. Convience, low noise floors and consistancy will always win out over high resolution. Also, check out some of the articles in Broadcast Engineering for what HDTV really means for most of the world. According to studies of visual acuity done years ago, most of us won't really notice much of a difference in HDTV's resolution (unless you have a wall size projector, and you sit very close to it). But, what we will notice is lower noise floors, and better color reproduction.