High-Def TVs?

Three points:

-- A standard definition program blown up to the size of a 50 inch screen WILL look horrible, unless viewed from a considerable distance. One of the most fundamental reasons for hd is to support large screen sizes.

-- Different hd sets will differ in picture quality when displaying sd material.

-- The February 2009 changeover to all-digital broadcasting only affects over-the-air broadcasts, that are received through an antenna. It has no relevance to cable users.

Regards,
-- Al

One more point. The conversion to over-the-air digital broadcasting does not mean that everything will be hd. Digital broadcasts can be sd or hd. SD digital broadcasts will generally look sharper, though, then sd analog broadcasts. The downside of digital broadcasting is that if the signal strength is not above a certain threshold, instead of seeing a weak snowy picture (as with analog), you will see either nothing or a picture that intermittently breaks up.

Regards,
-- Al

As I understand it, the only TV's that will not work after the 17th are ones that have no coax cable input on them. If your TV has a coax input, you should be fine.

More precisely, the TV needs to have an ATSC tuner, rather than an older NTSC tuner, to receive digital over-the-air broadcasts without a converter box. There is not necessarily a correlation between that and the presence of a coaxial input connector.

Regards,
-- Al

Dave, what you've observed is ABSOLUTELY correct, as is your conclusion. The standard-definition picture looks bad on the set you describe . . . because this set has a bad picture. And unfortuneately, this is the case with most new TVs, of any technology.

Whether or not they look great with a high-definition picture is irrelevant . . . if you were shopping for new speakers, and they only sounded good on SACDs, but worse than your current pair on CDs, would you buy them? With a good HD source, it's easy to make a television look good . . . just like if you had a Studer A-80 reel-to-reel playing Tape Project reels as a source, you could make some pretty modest amps and speakers sound amazing.

It seems that the market for TVs these days is much like mass-market stereo receivers in the early 1970s -- major wars going on between big Asian companies for market dominance. The major target for their efforts are middle-class males, who have an insatiable appetite for armchair technical analysis and a cheap price tag. Hence, if you want the biggest numbers and most acronyms for the lowest price, it's a buyer's market.

But the intelligent way to buy a television is the same way one would shop for audio . . . bring in your own media on DVD, and compare the picture quality to what you already have at home.