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50% of HDTV Owners Don't Use HD

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the blinking-12:00 dept.

Ant writes "Broadband Reports and Techdirt posted The Technology Liberation Front's article that said apparently half of all High Definition Television (HDTV) owners don't actually use the HD capabilities of their set, and nearly a quarter think they are watching high definition video when they actually haven't set it up correctly. Set-top box maker, Scientific Atlanta's survey, noted that HDTV sets will be in approximately 16 million homes across the country by the end of the year."

3 of 677 comments (clear)

  1. Where? by KyrBe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "16 million homes across the country by the end of the year"

    Which country? Mongolia... Peru... Turkmenistan?

  2. Do many people *really* care about HDTV by Viol8 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm not trolling , but does anyone really care enough about HDTV to
    fork out huge wads of cash on a new set? Perhaps its different in
    the USA with NTSC but here in the UK we have the PAL system which does
    a nice 625 lines per picture and a good PAL set does an extremely
    good picture. Sure , HDTV would be better , but $3000 worth better?
    I'm not convinced and neither is my wallet.

    1. Re:Do many people *really* care about HDTV by DrXym · · Score: 4, Interesting
      It may have 625 lines but only 576 are visible and the picture is interlaced on top of that. Despite that, I think the picture quality is okay and certainly much better than NTSC. Of course it depends on what channel you're watching as well and what content. If you end up watching some crap US imported comedy on a crap highly compressed channel, the picture quality will be horrible. If you watch one of the main channels such as BBC, picture quality is just fine and widescreen already.

      Still, HDTV is coming to the UK. Lots of TVs are tagging themselves as "HDTV Ready" though what that means is highly questionable. There are a lot of different HDTV resolutions and progressive & interlaced modes to choose from. The labelling is confusing as hell and I would be extremely wary of buying a TV now when there is nothing to test it against. I truly expect some chumps will buy their HDTV now and the warranty will have expired before they discover what the quality is truly like. On top of that Sky are touting some HDTV channels but where is the pricing for them? When is the service and the HDTV rolling out? How many channels are there? When will Sky+ go HDTV? I wouldn't put it past Sky to bend the early adopters over and rape them for every penny they have. The only other use for HDTV at present is the XBox 360 and next year the PS3. That hardly seems worth it either.

      Better to wait a few years until there is a market and channels that actually justify the price of these things.