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CableCARDs and HDTV
An anonymous reader writes: "HDTV is the next big thing. I attended the NAB conference in Las Vegas last week and everyone was pitching HDTV or asking about it. DesignTechnica has an interesting article on CableCARDS, which allows viewing HDTV through a CableCARD compatible HDTV set without needing a set top box. Cable companies are required to enable CableCARDs with card-compatible HDTVs by July 1, 2004. So here's some questions: Has anyone heard of CableCARD? Is anyone planning on buying a CableCARD compatible TV? How many people actually get HDTV in their area, and how many channels? HDTV is so hyped right now but seems that there is barely any deployment."
What exactly turns you people on about watching TV in higher resolution? I've been watching TV on a standard television for decades now and I've never sat there and said "you know, this episode of Law and Order would've been much better if it was broadcast at a higher resolution". I'm a computer geek and love my new toys, but I have absolutely zero interest in buying an HDTV compatible television set. The paradigm of a central broadcaster feeding me content without interactive control over it is boring to me. If my TV died tomorrow I'd probably go for years without replacing it. It's just not a focal point of my life.
For me, the actual television shows wouldn't matter. I don't watch broadcast or cable, I use my TV as a monitor for watching DVDs on.
I would love to have an HDTV so I could see more detail in the films I watch. I'm not interested in paying the ridiculous amounts of money that they cost right now, so it will probably be a few years before I have one.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Try to find a true HDTV Monitor. No, not HTDV compatible, but really HDTV.
It's not 1024x768 (DMD) or even 1280x1024 (LCOS). It's 1920x1080. Didn't the industry learn from the lawsuits on disk drive size and display diagonal measurements? (Of course they did, they learned that lying generates far more profit than the resulting lawsuits consume.)
I think it's kind of a rip that there's a ton of hype over HDTV, and that people are rushing off to buy HDTV "compatible" TVs, spending nearly $10,000 for some, and not one is true HDTV. Of course, in a year or two when the plasma screen finally fades away, the replacement model might actually be HDTV.
OK, there are videophiles who know the difference, and dig up something real like a nice Barco CRT projector. But most people are being defrauded.
Nicolas Negroponte said it best:
"When you look at television, ask yourself: What's wrong with it? Picture resolution? Of course not. What's wrong is the programming."