Old Unhip Person's Direct TV Question

[KeithK]

[q]You should watch a few programs on big screen HD, you'll be hooked. [/q]I keep hearing this.... HD sometimes seems like some kind of a cult where those who have been hooked proclaim the wonders of HD incessantly.  I'm skeptical, but then I haven't really been indoctrinated yet.

[q]Anyway, the resolution of a 19" set with standard def isn't a lot different from the resolution of a 50" HDTV.[/q]Bill's comment makes me realize that improved resolution becomes increasingly important as the screen size becomes bigger.  But I don't really have the room for anything much bigger than my current 32" unless I splurge for LCD/plasma types, and the game looks OK to my eyes at standard def on 32".

[Chris \'03]

[Q]Oat Wrote:

 What website do you go to to stream CN8 for free? Is it live streaming? Or do you have to wait a few days for them to set it up before you can stream the video? What is your "decent quality" like? Can you see the puck? Smooth frames?

Sorry I had too many questions   [/q]

Just go to cn8.tv, choose your region (the games are usually  on the new england cn8), then click watch now. Results probably vary so see for yourself: http://cn8.tv/channel/article.asp?lArticleID=4664&lChannelID=604&subhead=cn8live

All the programming is streamed live.

[billhoward]

There's a lot of MIT-level stuff (sorry, let's say Engineering School-level stuff) about viewing angle vs. distance from the screen and the eye's ability to discern or resolve / not resolve individual pixels.

Panasonic, first out with 50" and 65" 1920x1080 (progresive) flat panels (plasma) says you can sit six feet away and not see indivdual pixels while having a "movie theater" experience, which may also be a way of saying your eyes may have trouble picking up the action on the far sides of the screen.

A flat panel LCD (mostly for sets under 40 inches) or plasma (37" and above), when you push it back against the wall, you've increased the distance from you to the front of the screen by about 12"" to 24" if you're now using a 27" or 32" set. The flat panels are 4 to 6 inches deep. Plasma is best for low light; the screens have a wicked reflection and the older sets dissipate 500 watts when running (the best are down at LCD levels, about 150 watts). But plasmas have blacker blacks and are better at not smearing motion. LCDs are better for well lit rooms. Mostly it's a non issue because only in the range of about 40" can you have the choice of both, although Sharp did show (shipping in Japan) a 65" LCD Aquos. More amazing for gamer fanatics, they're on the cusp of shipping an LCD that shows different images from left and right angles - sort of like the pictures that fade from Elvis to Jesus as you walk by. It also means a car LCD display could show the driver nav information and the passenger a movie.

Prices are definitely going to come down. Panasonic is bringing online a plasma factory that can do 5 million units a year. That one plant increases WW production capacity by something half. Remember what happens to prices when supply oversteps demand? But I don't think they're soon going to match the prices of rear projection and some of the sets are only about 12" deep.

No matter how good your display, most of what's on is still crap. "BayWatch HD," anyone? And it'll be the odd college hockey game that's in HD, not all of them.

[DeltaOne81]

Prices for the tvs are coming down, but what gets me is, at least with DirecTV, I'd have to add like a $10 or $15 monthly package to get like 10 or 15 HD versions of channels. And then, on an HDTV (and I know cause I've seen it), the rest of the channels look like crap.

So I pay a little to a lot more for a tv (depending), up my monthly DTV bill 15%, only to change my experience from ~200 very good channels to 20 good ones and 200 lousy ones. Yeah, I'll be holding off

[Trotsky]

[Q]billhoward Wrote:
The point is, if over the next four years you invest $5,000 in your TV programming, maybe you should be watching it on a $2,000 HDTV not $400 27-inch CRT. [/q]

I disagree.

First, the money I spend on TV is not an investment, it's pure overhead with no redeeming value other than the immediate.  My daughter's braces are investment.  My daughter's iPod is overhead.

What I want in TV is a signal.  The signal shouldn't be too crappy, or I'll get annoyed and lose the entertainment value.  But each quality increase represents a smaller and smaller margin "return" for my money.  What I get for the basic outlay for the signal are the games -- and they are worth that cost in my labor.  But what I get for the quality jump to HDTV is worth almost no labor to me, since it's a nearly valueless perk.

I drive 25,000 miles a year.  Shouldn't I be driving it in a luxury car?  No.
My house is my largest investment.  Should't I have gotten one twice as big?  No.

[billhoward]

[OT squared] Excellent point about diminishing returns. The biggest gains in our TV watching lifetime (most of our lifetimes) was color over black & white (if you go way back, TV over radio), then cable over over-the-air (more choices) or satellite for people in the boondocks (TV, period), DVD/digital over broadcast/VHS/analog. In that scheme, HDTV is more an enhancement, although more than a just noticeable difference. For sports especially which I think is where this conversation came in.

If you like car analogies, someone who drives 25,000 miles a year shouldn't necessarily have to buy a luxury car even if the miles go more satisfactorily in a G35 than a Toyota Tercel. But as long as you've made the investment - time, not dollars - in all that driving, you don't have to live the life of a monk behind the wheel. Your car ought to have lumbar support (at least not crappy seats), a leather wrapped steering wheel, decent sound and satellite radio or an iPod jack, maybe a drivetrain that only turns 2,000 rpm at 60mph if you do highway driving. Since we've licked polio, cholera is not a bid deal here, and if you're not an at-risk group for gunshot injuries or STDs, about the only thing left to die from before 50 is car accidents, so maybe side head protection airbags are good to have and those haven't yet filtered down to economy cars. Life's a journey.

What are you driving?

And we just signed on for braces, too. Heh - our dentist drives a 911.

[CowbellGuy]

OK, so we're past the point where you had to buy a $500 HD DTV receiver. I don't see anything about that on the surface. $11 a month for the HD package doesn't bother me. There aren't a ton of channels, but the ones for which it's most important are covered. Sports, locals, discovery, HBO, that kind of thing. I don't think anyone cares if the Food Network is HD. So I'm on board with that.

Obviously, I'd need a new TV. My current 32" is only a few years old and still pretty decent, but i could see replacing it with an HD unit and repurposing it elsewhere in my house. Prices are getting reasonable. So I'm on board with that.

Now we come to my TiVos. I have 2 lifetime subscription boxes. That's a $600 investment on top of the actual box costs and extra drives I've stuffed in them. So now, I'd be forced to ditch them and get DirecTV's HD TiVo box. But wait, what's this? Oh you DO have to pay for the box from DTV. It's only $250 now, though. How nice of them to not mention it anywhere. Or if I want to go with the DVR, it's $599 AFTER a $100 rebate.

So in the end, I'd lose almost $1000 invested in current TiVo equipment, have to buy a new TV, and pay DTV $600 just to get in the door. Sorry, we're not there yet.

Having said all that, I've seen hockey and baseball and racing in HD, and it really is all that. I don't need convincing. I definitely WANT it, but the activation energy is still too high.

[Jordan 04]

Great timing on this conversation for me, as I'm about to (withing 24-48 hours probably) to take the plunge and upgrade from my 27" CRT to a Sony 42" RPLCD.  I still have some issues with paying 2500+ for a television, but with prices on the rear-projections sitting around 1800-1900 in the big box stores and 1600-1700 online, I can't hold myself back any longer.

Throw on $18/month for a 2-tuner DVR from time warner plus the HD package, and I'm starting to salivate...

[jtwcornell91]

I have to say, the quantum leap in quality I've seen for HD programming is for shows that are shot letterboxed.  I'm not so worked up about the picture quality, but if I could get a set that lets me see the whole picture instead of the middle 75% (or whatever) that'd be nice.

[billhoward]

Half the widescreen sets, many of which are HDTV, the user never figures out how to handle standard 4:3 broadcasts and they wind up being stretched. Shaq's butt is the size of the Florida panhandle, the goal behind Leneveu appears to be 4-by-8 feet, Oprah appears to be back to comfort foods, and Calista Flockhart appears to be past her alleged bout with anorexia.

[jtwcornell91]

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

 Half the widescreen sets, many of which are HDTV, the user never figures out how to handle standard 4:3 broadcasts and they wind up being stretched.[/q]

That sounds like a feature of half the users rather than half the sets.

[billhoward]

If half the users cannot make a feature work, and it frustrates them, that's a barrier to buying (their friends hear of the hassles and don't buy), so then it's a problem for the manufacturers. There is no IQ test for the right to own a TV set. In fact ..

[TimV]

How do you suggest handling 4:3 broadcasts?  I have a 16:9 sony CRT HDTV that offers 4 choices:  a)Normal b)stretch c)Fill (and one more - I'm not writing this from where the TV is)?  If I use "fill" it looks OK but I lose the "crawls" that report scores etc.  "Normal" leaves the picture small relative to the screen size.

[BCrespi]

I find when watching my home set (Panasonic LCD wide-screen) that I occasionally have to adjust the tv's aspect ratio as well as the cable box's.  See if some other comination than you have been trying is better.

[Al DeFlorio]

[Q]TimV Wrote:

 How do you suggest handling 4:3 broadcasts?  I have a 16:9 sony CRT HDTV that offers 4 choices:  a)Normal b)stretch c)Fill (and one more - I'm not writing this from where the TV is)?  If I use "fill" it looks OK but I lose the "crawls" that report scores etc.  "Normal" leaves the picture small relative to the screen size.[/q]

I have five choices for handling 4:3 broadcasts on my 16:9 Samsung projection set:  "wide" (just stretches the picture evenly across the entire screen); "panorama" (stretches the right and left edges of the picture a lot and the center hardly at all); two variants of "zoom" (cut off the top and bottom in order to fill the edges, but degrade the picture); and "normal" (standard 4:3 picture with gray borders on each side).  

My preference is "panorama," and everyone watching that I ask seems to agree.  You don't lose the "crawls" but they do move faster at the right and left of the screen.